Of all the modern thinkers who have been influenced by St Augustine of Hippo, from Pascal and Rousseau to Wittgenstein and Hannah Arendt, none ought to have been better qualified to follow in his footsteps than the former Archbishop of Canterbury, now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge: Rowan Williams. He is widely acknowledged to have been one of the most distinguished theologians to have occupied the throne of the “other” Augustine — St Augustine of Canterbury, who converted the Anglo-Saxons. His study of the Bishop of Hippo, On Augustine, will be published by Bloomsbury in time for Easter. He has written some 40 books, reads nine languages and speaks three. Already Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at 36, he was one of Mr Toad’s clever men at Oxford who know all that there is to be knowed. He is also a poet in the Celtic tradition of his countrymen and a life peer.

And yet Dr Williams is overrated. It is a harsh judgment on such a clubbable cleric, whose sibilant voice and Druidic beard made him instantly recognisable, who did his best to adapt the Church of England to the secular new saeculum, and whose public visibility gave a whole new meaning to the Anglican via media. Yet prelates are not there to be liked. As Primate of All England, Dr Williams was supposed to offer spiritual leadership to the nation. How well did he discharge his duties? As one of Britain’s most fêted public intellectuals, he has been a ubiquitous Christian presence in hostile company; but he is often merely a token presence. Typically, Dr Williams is more concerned to accommodate “the Other”, however inimical, than to assert the truth of his own creed. He has rarely mounted a vigorous defence of what is, after all, not only his personal faith, but the established religion of the land. Nor has he always seemed eager to stand up for the public role of the Church — now finally abandoned by Baroness Butler-Sloss’s Commission on Religion and Public Life.

As Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, he sometimes seemed to do the opposite. Most notoriously, in 2008 he declared that the adoption of Sharia law in Britain “seems unavoidable”; Muslims should not have to accept that “there’s one law for everybody”. Though criticised, he refused to retract views shared by Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice and later President of the Supreme Court. Their advocacy undoubtedly facilitated and accelerated the spread of Sharia courts or “councils”.

Such acquiescence in what some might see as the relinquishing of England’s Christian patrimony fits with his vehement opposition to Western intervention in the Middle East. In 2007 he denounced US action against Syria as “criminal, ignorant and murderous folly”. Dr Williams has been consistent in siding against the West since his youthful support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Unlike his predecessor, George Carey, he has seldom gone out on a limb for persecuted Christians. Unlike his successor, Justin Welby, Dr Williams never really left his previous profession behind.

What led such a conventional left-wing professor to suppose that he was equal to the task of acting on a global stage? In 2002, when Tony Blair appointed Dr Williams, even conservatives such as Charles Moore greeted him as “prophetic”. The favoured alternative was Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester: a man no less intelligent but far more tough-minded, with first-hand knowledge and experience of the Muslim world and the ability to articulate the dangers posed by radical Islam. Dr Williams was on the liberal, Dr Nazir-Ali on the traditionalist side of the bitter disputes within the Anglican Communion over women and homosexuality. Church unity seemed the most important issue facing Anglicans at the time, but with hindsight it mattered much less than the then emergent threat to Western civilisation. It is a tragedy that Mr Blair felt obliged to appoint a man to lead the Church of England who had plenty of charisma but lacked the charismatic gift of wisdom.

Augustine of Hippo was hard on those, including himself, whose pride blinded them to their limitations. He only achieved maturity as a writer after coming to realise that his intellectual gifts were of no account compared to the vocation to which God was calling him. What, then, of the spiritual journey of Dr Williams? He has yet to write his Confessions, but it is hard to imagine him wrestling with his conscience. Whatever spiritual depths may be concealed behind the obscurity of his prose, he has not hinted at repentance for any sins, either of commission or omission, during his archiepiscopate. Augustine taught us to love the sinner and hate the sin, yet Dr Williams finds it hard to condemn either. Long before Pope Francis, he made a virtue of refusing to be judgmental. Embracing the zeitgeist in this way does not absolve him of the sin of intellectual pride. Giving up academic life, he wrote: “I was being asked to leave behind an environment where I could feel more pleased with myself than bishops normally can.” Now that he has returned to his comfort zone as Master of Magdalene, is Rowan Williams still pleased with himself?

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This in itself implies that those principles of duty or theological belief must differ in some ways from, or at least go beyond, what ordinary human reasonableness would have come up with. But there is a deeper and sharper problem here. The “liberal” view is that it is wrong to penalise people for failings which are not their own fault; good intentions and best efforts must be accepted as sufficient. Yet a human being who happens not to have been informed about the contents of divine revelation stands — if that revelation really does give the essential and otherwise unavailable key to eternal life — at a stupendous disadvantage. That people who have rejected Christianity should go to Hell may seem, at least to a believing Christian, entirely right and proper. But what about the ones who never even had a chance to accept it?

The problem raised by the idea that good pagans will burn in Hell-fire is more troubling than the other familiar problems that arise over the apparent injustice of God. There is the problem of undeserved pain and suffering in this life, for example, or the fact that we see wicked men prospering. In those cases, at least one part of the answer will be that the afflicted may be compensated in the next life, and the wrongdoers will be punished. By all means, let the wicked fry in Hell — but why should they find themselves frying alongside innocent and virtuous pagans?

The robust answer to all these questions is to say: God is simply not “fair”, if by fairness you mean the paltry and inadequate human version of that concept. God’s justice is absolute, more pure and more perfect than anything we can grasp. And it is bound up with the purpose for which He made us, which is also beyond our comprehension. How can the creature judge the Creator? Hath not the potter power over the clay?

In the Christian tradition, few thinkers have taken the robust line more robustly than Saint Augustine. Only those who believed in Jesus Christ, he declared, could be saved. Like other Fathers of the Church, he assumed that after the coming of Christ on earth the Gospel had rapidly become available to the entire human race, which meant that all post-Christ pagans were somehow guilty of rejecting the truth. For the period before Christ, Augustine allowed that God did grant miraculous prophetic knowledge of the advent of Jesus to some individuals (above all, the leading Jewish figures of the Old Testament). But whereas a more liberal-minded thinker might have used this escape-clause to claim that God had granted salvation to huge numbers of virtuous pre-Christian pagans, Augustine was scornful about the very idea that pagans could, by their own efforts, be morally good at all. Any virtues which are not animated by the love of God are, he argued, not in fact real virtues. They are self-regarding performances, tainted by pride — or, in the words popularised by a later writer in the Augustinian tradition, splendida peccata, shining or splendiferous sins.

John Marenbon’s fascinating new book on what he calls the Problem of Paganism takes Augustine’s position as its historical starting-point, and traces subsequent debates all the way to the end of the 17th century. This is much more than, and quite different from, a chronological survey of well-known arguments. While some of the thinkers discussed here (Boethius, Aquinas, Thomas More, Leibniz) are the subjects of huge modern secondary literatures, Marenbon constantly cuts across the standard discussions at a fresh angle, bringing new connections to light. This book is also no routine exercise in the history of medieval (and post-medieval) philosophy; it focuses on literary texts (Dante, Boccaccio, Langland, Chaucer), and on medieval and Renaissance works describing contacts with actual contemporary pagans. Those who know of Marenbon as a world authority on some dauntingly technical areas of medieval philosophy will be pleasantly surprised to encounter, in these pages, Peter of Dusberg’s description of pagan Prussian funerary practices, or Garcilaso de la Vega’s defence of the monotheism of the Incas, or Jean de Léry’s account of the virtues of the cannibalistic Tupí Indians of Brazil.

The long-running debate about whether pagans can be saved has attracted some historical studies in the past, of course. But Marenbon’s Problem of Paganism goes beyond the story of that theological question, embracing two other, closely related issues: whether pagans can have true virtue, and whether they can acquire true wisdom or philosophical understanding. The most liberal position would be to say “yes” to the second of these, and then, on the basis that true wisdom must include true ethics, “yes” to the first; in which case, with the help of some liberal assumptions about how and why God will grant people salvation, one can also give a “yes” to the theological question about whether pagans can go to Heaven. The relation between these three issues was seldom as straightforward as that, however. Much of the fascination of this book lies in seeing how attitudes and arguments shifted to and fro, as the pieces in this three-cornered puzzle were constantly altered and rearranged.

One thing is very clear: the hardline Augustinian position never went away. There were medieval writers who reasserted it (including some very fierce-sounding Franciscans), and in the 17th century Cornelius Jansenius, founder of the French “Jansenist” movement, would stonily insist that the virtues of the best pagans were “not true virtues, but vices hidden by the name and appearance of virtues”.

In the hands of some writers, the hard-line position became more obdurate even as it became less Augustinian. In a marvellously illuminating chapter on Dante, Marenbon points out that, far from representing a standard medieval view (as generations of readers have assumed), his treatment of the pagans is peculiarly severe. Dante does allow that pagans can have real virtue, yet still he insists that virtue is of no help in enabling pagans to avoid Hell: “I am Virgil,” says his virtuous guide, “and I have lost heaven for no other fault than not having faith.” The whole discussion of Dante here justifies Marenbon’s three-cornered approach to the “Problem of Paganism”; by studying the poet’s attitude to pagan wisdom, and placing him in a tradition of what he calls “limited relativism”, he helps us to see how it was that Dante simultaneously softened the Augustinian criticism of merely human virtue, and strengthened the distinction between the sphere of human wisdom and the sphere of faith.

Augustine’s doctrine was always present, but it was seldom a dominant orthodoxy. There were many ways of countering, evading or adapting its arguments. The great and highly original 12th-century theologian Peter Abelard laid down a path which many would follow later. His idea was that if you studied the works of ancient pagan philosophers (those, at least, that were available in the 12th century — one of whom, “Hermes Trismegistus”, was in fact much less ancient than people imagined), you could find clear hints of Christian theology, including knowledge of the Holy Trinity. To some extent, he thought, sheer unassisted human reason had been able to work out not only that there was one God (omnipotent, Creator, etc), but also that that God must have a threefold or triune identity.

As a good Christian, however, Abelard thought that only belief in the incarnated Christ could bring salvation; so he also supposed that where an ancient pagan thinker had tiptoed towards this threshold of Christian belief, God had then stepped in to bestow, by supernatural means, some prophetic knowledge of Christ’s human existence on earth.

In this way Abelard supplied later writers with not one but two very fertile ideas: the notion that valid theological knowledge did circulate among ancient pagans, and the claim that people could be turned, by a “special inspiration” from God, into Christians, long before the actual coming of Christ. (As a theoretical possibility that last idea had already been put forward by Augustine himself, whose “City of God” existed, interspersed among the human race, in all ages; but Abelard’s argument that wise pagans had reached the very threshold of Christian belief by their own efforts was deeply un-Augustinian.)

The most influential opponent of Augustine was Thomas Aquinas. His answer to the question of whether pagans could acquire real wisdom was a resounding “yes”: the towering philosophical structure which he spent a lifetime building had the teachings of Aristotle as its foundations, and the nature of the construction was meant to demonstrate a seamless transition, above a certain level, from the truths of human philosophy to the ones supplied by divine revelation.

On the issue of pagan virtue, Aquinas respected the theological principle that virtue in the full sense must be animated by the love of God, but he dismissed the Augustinian idea that pagans cannot be virtuous at all: they can indeed do “those good works for which the good of nature suffices”.

As for salvation: on this point Aquinas seems most radical of all, but, as Marenbon shows, he was simply developing a line of thought set out by previous writers. While he supposed that God might use “special inspiration” in exceptional cases (including Kaspar Hauser-like children, brought up among wolves without any human instruction), for his general solution to the problem he turned to a quite different concept: “implicit faith”. Pagan philosophers who had arrived at a basic monotheistic understanding could vow to believe whatever might be known about God by those whose knowledge was greater than theirs. In the ancient world, those superior figures were in fact the Jewish prophets, illuminated by God. But it was not necessary for pagans to meet them, or even to know who they were; a sincere belief that such people must exist was quite sufficient. The flexibility — or, if you prefer, generosity — of this argument is rather breathtaking.

All these positions, pro- and anti-Augustinian, were adopted primarily in order to argue about pagans of the ancient world, especially the most virtuous Greeks and Romans. Any interaction between these debates and discussions of contemporary pagans was quite limited, thanks to the continuing belief that, in the words of St Jerome, “no people remains which does not know the name of Jesus, and, even if they have not had a preacher, they cannot however be unaware of the faith from neighbouring peoples”. The discovery of the New World would shake that assumption to its foundations.

The last part of this book is dominated by the effects of that discovery — not just the jolt it gave to abstract knowledge, but the practical effects of a process of conquest which brought Christian governors, and Christian priests, into close contact with real live pagans. Some parts of the resulting ferment of ideas are fairly well known, such as the great mid-16th-century disputation at Valladolid between the humanist scholar and pro-conquest hardliner Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and the Dominican defender of the Amerindians, Bartolomé de las Casas. But Marenbon’s account sets them in a longer context of theological argument which few previous writers have considered in such depth. (Even so, Las Casas’s justification of human sacrifice may still take the reader by surprise.)

Marenbon’s survey of the 16th- and 17th-century debates may be a little more schematic than his searching account of the medieval arguments, but it does suffice to make one large point, which he emphasises in his conclusion: while we may think that the shift from medieval mentalities to early modern ones was a move away from rigid religious dogmas towards more human and tolerant positions, the evidence of these debates fails to support that view. There was no clear direction of “progress”, and the anti-pagan positions of some 17th-century Protestants and Jansenists were more uncompromising than those of almost any previous writers in the Augustinian tradition. Marenbon does not speculate about the reasons for this; one, surely, is the fact that “Socinianism”, from the late 16th century, and “Deism”, from the late 17th, were bugbears that genuinely frightened many mainstream theologians. Both were forms of “rational theology” (the former with a strongly biblical basis, at least to begin with, but the latter not even with that), with far-reaching implications about the power of human reason to work out what God would, or would not, do. The danger that the information provided by the Bible might turn out to be quite secondary (or even irrelevant) to human intuitions about the nature of divine justice now seemed very real, as it had never done before.

Which brings us back to revelation, and our liberal understanding of what is reasonable. It would be easy to read the story told in this book as a struggle between, on the one hand, people who were Augustinian because they were illiberal, and, on the other, their opponents, whose essentially liberal impulses drove them to find ways of accommodating virtuous pagans in the divine scheme of things. Such a portrayal would surely have been unrecognisable to the people involved. The idea that human ethical intuitions were primary, and that theological principles were secondary things, to be moulded to fit them, would have bewildered these thinkers. Today we live in a world where the expectations, and hence also the bewilderment, go in the opposite direction. That is, at the very least, another reason why we need an expert such as John Marenbon to guide us through the thinking of such a very different age.

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It is said that the Duke of Norfolk, who was a retired general and “Britain’s leading Catholic layman”, had ordered the Papal Nuncio to choose Cormac. This is an over-simplification, but Cormac and Miles Norfolk had been friends and Arundel neighbours for many years.

My first encounter with the new Archbishop was perplexing. Four months into his reign, he gave away the prizes at Westminster Cathedral Choir School, where my eldest son was a chorister. WCCS parents include a high proportion of diplomats, captains of industry and politicians. The new Archbishop’s address was rambling, inconsequential, almost a music hall parody of a folksy Irish priest. Afterwards a fellow parent, the American director of a major British company, remarked that, although not himself a Catholic, he had been expecting something more enlightening from “your new guy”. So had I.

The Murphy-O’Connor family background was profoundly Irish, not rich but “with the smell of money”. The men became doctors or priests, with the exception of one in each generation who ran a wine merchant at Cork, “Dispensers of Wine and Spirits to the Clergy and Gentry of Southern Ireland”. One forebear became the first Archbishop of Hobart in Tasmania, and lived to 96. Many of the women became nuns.

Cormac’s father George was a doctor who, in 1918, bought a substantial practice at Reading. Here he and his wife, also from a well-to-do Cork family, raised a large family, sporty, musical and pious. Cormac and his brothers played rugby and were educated by the Christian Brothers at Bath, whence they returned with coarse manners that shocked their mother (she would have preferred to send them to the Jesuits at Beaumont). The family regarded themselves as English, though the connection with Ireland remained strong, and Cormac retains to this day a soft Irish accent.

Three of the boys became priests and one a British Army officer. Aged 18, Cormac went to the Venerable English College in Rome, where he developed a new Roman layer to his personality. Although bright, he says he was not in the same league as his cousin Jerome, a Dominican friar and a great New Testament scholar.

Ordained in 1956, he began his ministry as a curate in working-class parishes in and around Portsmouth. Concerned by his parishioners’ ignorance of the fundamentals of the faith, he instituted small prayer and discussion groups, an approach he would build on in later years.

Cormac’s rise to eminence began in 1966 when he was appointed secretary to the dynamic Bishop of Portsmouth Derek Worlock, a terrific operator from whom he learned much. This was during the ferment that followed the Second Vatican Council, theologically Cormac’s formative experience. In 1971 he went back to Rome as rector of the Venerable English College, where he would have encountered many Vatican power-brokers. That led seamlessly to the see of Arundel and Brighton; here Cormac was clearly very happy, waited on by three nuns in an agreeable house at Storrington, co-chairing the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission and supervising 140 clergy across Surrey and Sussex.

One of those was Father Michael Hill, whom Cormac had sent away for treatment following complaints of child abuse. After failing to complete the course, Hill begged to be allowed to return to his vocation. Cormac appointed him chaplain at Gatwick airport where, he thought charitably, he could do no harm. That, of course, was a bad mistake, and Hill was jailed in 1997 and again in 2002 for further pederastic offences.

This came home to Cormac when the BBC broke the story shortly after his translation to Westminster. He considered resigning, but, to his credit, dealt with the problem head-on. The result was the Nolan Commission and the current rigorous system for safeguarding children in the British Catholic church. The Nolan approach has been imitated by churches around the world, although the Vatican remains institutionally woolly on the subject.

This episode, which is likely to be all that the secular world remembers of his time at Westminster, illustrates Cormac’s strengths: steadiness under fire and a sure touch with the establishment. It did not prevent him receiving his cardinal’s hat in February 2001.

An English Spring is a quiet read, and the chapter on the Murphy-O’Connor family is the best. Nevertheless Cormac gently conveys the essence of his approach. He is a Vatican II man, interested in ecumenism and re-evangelising a society that has largely lost touch with organised religion. Where Basil Hume believed that everything began with the sacraments, “My experience has been that you’ve got to hear the Gospel first, and have some experience of what the Christian life looks and tastes like.” He approves of the Alpha Course.

That outlook brings him firmly into Pope Francis’s camp, though he professes to admire John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Cormac and Cardinal Bergoglio hit it off when they were red-hatted in 2001, and were part of a group of like-minded cardinals he dubbed La Squadra (the Team). Although he betrays no secrets, there is a fascinating account of the 2005 conclave that elected Benedict. At 81 Cormac was too old for the next election, but he dined with Bergoglio the night before it began. After the Argentine emerged as Pope Francis I, he greeted Cormac with the words: “Tuo e culpevole!” (You’re to blame.)

Many English Catholics feel that Cormac, perhaps because he is at ease with the powerful, failed to lead from the front on issues that matter to them: secularisation, marriage, abortion and media hostility. This is not entirely fair: mostly he was not listened to by government or the media, even though he received Tony Blair into the Catholic Church shortly after he left office.

Ironically, it has taken the slaughter of Christians in the Middle East to bring Christianity back into the national discourse. And it has been the tireless work of lay agencies such as Aid to the Church in Need, rather than the faint exhortations of the bishops, that has proved most effective. In a post-Vatican II Church, that may be the way ahead — and one that Cormac himself might approve.

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The account begins in the sixth century, with the efforts of Cassiodorus and his contemporary Boethius to preserve and transmit the cultural heritage of the ancient world. Boethius was hanged by the Gothic king Theodoric, but Fried resists the temptation to see here the shape of the Dark Ages. Theodoric was no less committed than was Boethius to the maintenance of Roman identity. His ruthlessness could in fact be seen in this light: the king was hardly the first ancient ruler to do away with a philosopher.

Fried’s story kicks into life with the Empire of Charlemagne, the largest polity in the Latin West after the fall of Rome. The political revival of the imperial project was short-lived, but its cultural initiative was to endure. Seven thousand Latin manuscripts survive from the ninth century, over three times as many as from all previous centuries. This is a vital patrimony. If there is one thing which gives meaning to the “Middle Ages” as a historical period, it is the parchment codex. As a form of information technology, the medieval book stands precisely “in the middle”, between the papyrus scrolls of Antiquity and the printed volumes of the post-Gutenberg era. Renaissance humanists knew how much they owed to ninth-century scribes, even as they launched their own shameless self-mythologisation.

The manuscript book aside, from every other angle what strikes one is the difference between the early and the high Middle Ages—between the world of Theodoric and Charlemagne on the one hand, and on the other, that of Paris and Bologna from the 12th century onwards. In Fried’s extreme characterisation, the earlier epoch is all but incapable of abstract thought, forever in the thrall of a magical approach to the universe. In the new world born after the year 1000, he proposes, we find the release of secular thinking based on the exercise of free will, and the capacity for love in defiance of all convention. If Boethius is the hero of the former age, then Peter Abelard, logician, heretic and castrated lover of Heloise is the icon of the second.

There are problems with such an account, as Fried is not unaware. It is dangerous to render the early Middle Ages in terms of exotic primitivism, and conversely unwise to recognise too much of our modern selves in Peter Abelard. His account of his life in his so-called Story of my Calamities appears disarmingly frank, but we must remember that Abelard and his peers were trained rhetoricians. His is a highly wrought text, a public confessional performance as mannered as Kabuki theatre. No one in the Middle Ages wears their heart on their sleeve.

From here we must ask, to what extent is medieval Latin Christendom recognisable as “the modern West”? Fried’s account is ambivalent. While acknowledging the contribution to Latin intellectual culture of Byzantium and Islam, he wants to argue that the East lacked the dynamism of the West. At the same time, however, his pen portraits of figures such as Maimonides, the brilliant Jewish thinker and Saladin’s court physician, or Pletho, the Greek scholar and latterday Plato who trained under the Ottomans before coming to Medici Florence, suggest otherwise. Once we stand back, we may take the view that, in cultural terms, “the West” remained the Third World in the Middle Ages. Greater cultural and political power lay in Baghdad or Cairo until the end of the period, if not beyond.

Finally—and this Fried does intimate—there is the moral price of high culture to consider. In “pre-conceptual” Europe before 1000, the peasantry were relatively unconstrained, higher education was as open to women as to men, and the era saw no large-scale religious persecution. All of this was to change. The urban and urbane society of high medieval Europe was built on the systematic exploitation of peasant labour; the universities at the centre of this world were exclusively male clerical institutions; and the scholastic culture which fostered the development of “rational inquiry” also enabled the development of the Inquisition. In southern France in particular, this ecclesiastical machinery enabled the systematic search for and destruction of heretics. And then there were the pogroms. From the end of the 11th century onwards, across the cities of the Latin West, Jews were robbed, assaulted, and murdered with impunity. 

Was the persecution of heretics and Jews a phenomenon of mob violence which the clerical hierarchy sought to contain—or was it actually organised by the priests? Medievalists have been wrestling with the question for some time now. On one thing we agree. The debate has shifted since the 18th century. The charge against the Middle Ages is no longer that they are an era of “barbarism and superstition”, as Gibbon put it. The issue is rather that they conjoin, as can we, barbarism and civilisation. 

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The different schools of Islamic law are unanimous that the punishment for blasphemy is death. It is for this reason that the Federal Shari’at Court in Pakistan removed the alternative of life imprisonment for blaspheming against the Prophet of Islam and made the death sentence mandatory for this offence. The results of having such a law are well-known. Large numbers of Christians, Ahmadis (members of a heterodox sect) and even Muslims have been accused of blasphemy, tried and sentenced to death. Even people with a history of mental illness have not escaped the rigours of this law and recently, the Lahore High Court rejected the appeal of Asia Bibi, a poor peasant woman, against the sentence of capital punishment imposed on her for allegedly blaspheming in the course of witnessing to her Christian faith.

The law has been widely misused to settle personal scores and to gain an advantage in matters like property disputes. Once a charge is made, the accused’s fate is sealed. Both police and judiciary are intimidated by extremists and, at least in the lower courts, there can be only one result: conviction and the death sentence. In the case of Asia Bibi, the worrying development is that the higher courts too now seem to have been intimidated. It is concerning also that Pakistan’s example is being followed by other nations. The case of Raif Badawi, who has recently been convicted to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for insulting Islam in Saudi Arabia, is but one example of this tendency.

An important feature of the general atmosphere created by this law is a sharp increase in mob violence against those accused of blasphemy and this extends to their family, their home and even the village or community in which they live. There have been numerous attacks on places of worship, schools and Christian and Ahmadi communities because someone within these is alleged to have blasphemed. Mobs can be incited by someone with a personal grudge and mosque loudspeakers are used to gather crowds which are then encouraged to mete out “rough justice”.

Article 18 of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights guarantees the freedom of thought, conscience and religion and also the right to manifest our beliefs in teaching, practice, worship and observance. It also guarantees our right to change our beliefs. Although most Muslim countries have adopted this and other declarations, it has often been with a declared or mental reservation: insofar as they are consistent with sharia. This has led to various restrictions ranging from those on free speech to restriction and even prohibition of worship. It is interesting to note, in this connection, that Islamic declarations on human rights, such as the Cairo Declaration (1990) made by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, either omit Article 18 altogether or significantly alter its content to bring it closer to the requirements of sharia.

The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has long campaigned, with near-success, to have defamation of religion made an internationally recognised offence. It is only gradually that non-Muslim states have seen the implications of such a law for freedom of speech and of the press. There has also been pressure, by various Islamic organisations in the West, to bring in legislation against “hate speech”, which would restrict freedom to criticise or satirise religious beliefs. In Britain, an attempt by the previous government to bring in such legislation forbidding “hate speech” was only qualified by last-minute amendments in the House of Lords safeguarding academic discussion, preaching and propagation of secular and religious beliefs which might otherwise have been construed as hate speech against a particular religion or lifestyle. This has not prevented over-zealous police or other officials from trying to stop Christian evangelism in “Muslim areas”, forbidding the display of biblical texts in public places or arresting street preachers who were thought to be “offending” this or that pressure group.

In an important intervention in the Daily Telegraph, Dr Tim Winter (aka Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad), a senior Muslim theologian at Cambridge University, points out that image-making is itself an offence in Islam but then goes on to claim that what has immeasurably compounded this offence for Muslims is that the Charlie Hebdo, and the Danish cartoons, before that, were intended to “mock, deride and wound”. He goes on to say that to laugh at the Prophet cannot be understood as free speech but does not say whether academic discussion of him or apologetic by polemical secularists or Christians would be or could be. Using the by now well-known tactic of gaining domination through claiming victimhood, he appeals to Muslim lawyers in Britain to use existing hate speech, slander and libel legislation to trigger a series of complex cases which would lead to the protection of Muslims from “abuse”. As with the OIC’s exertions regarding the defamation of religion on the international stage, is this a thinly-veiled attempt to have some kind of blasphemy law recognised nationally?

What is the difference between Asia Bibi and numerous others on death row, having been convicted on blasphemy charges, and the killings on the streets of Paris and Copenhagen? Is judicial execution different from these extra and anti-judicial atrocities? Why does the international community tolerate one but not the other? Is it because Westerners are involved in one but not the other?

We can no longer avoid a serious discussion about blaspheming in Islam and the culture around it if we are to understand and to prevent both judicial execution and extra-judicial murders. As with apostasy, the Koran seems not to provide for any punishments in this life for blasphemy against God and the Prophet though again, as with apostasy, various unrelated verses are pressed into service by those who would find such a punishment in their scripture. The most the Koran does is to say that such people are cursed in this life and in the next where God will mete out to them “a humiliating punishment” (33:57). It is claimed that the execution of poets, such as Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf in 624 AD, for insulting the Prophet sets a precedent for executing blasphemers today. Others say that these poets were executed for inciting sedition and not merely for blasphemy.

Also, there are well-known stories of the Prophet forgiving some who had insulted him. It is incumbent on Muslims to follow the Sunnah, or practice of their Prophet. Which aspect will they follow today? A great deal depends on what answer is given to this questions.

Some scholars have suggested that there should be a high bar set for entertaining allegations of blasphemy. Those who make such accusations must themselves be pious Muslims and, if a false accusation is made, the penalty for this must be there same as for the offence of blasphemy itself. From time to time, proposals are put forward which will make it procedurally more difficult for such allegations to be brought but the fundamental questions remain that of free speech and the balance to be struck between this and civility in society, as well as the need for public order. Are there any limits on freedom of expression?

The UN Declaration itself provides for the possibility of restrictions for the purpose of securing due recognition for the right and the freedom of others and for meeting the just requirements of “morality, public order and the general welfare”. What does this mean? Do the limitations have to do only with law and can we include custom and convention in public life and the media?

In this sense the events in Paris which have highlighted the role of satirical magazines like Charlie Hebdo have also obscured the serious discussion which needs to take place about the authenticity of the extremists’ claim that they represent “true Islam”. Such a discussion needs to take place not only among Muslims but with all those who have to live in Muslim lands or who have Muslims as neighbours, colleagues and fellow-citizens. How is the Koran and the Sunnah to be interpreted and whose interpretation is correct? To what sources are the extremists appealing and can such appeals be countered?

In a free world the founders of all major religions will come under scrutiny: Moses, Muhammad and Jesus are not excluded from such study. What was their message? What were their aims? What kind of people were they? These are legitimate areas for serious discussion. It is a pity that they have been short-circuited, for the time being, by the “tongue in cheek” activities of satirists though, it is to be hoped, not for good.

Should religious believers seek any protection under the law from insult to their precious beliefs? People are protected from false statements being made about them either orally or in print. Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) also prohibits advocacy of religious hatred that leads to discrimination, hostility or violence against an individual or community. That is to say, the intention is to protect individuals and communities not articles or systems of belief as such. If a belief is attacked, surely its best defence is a reasoned response rather than violence or legal sanction?

The British in India sought to prevent the propagation of religious hatred as a means of promoting social harmony and maintaining public order. In certain contexts, this may be a legitimate aim but, if it is given legal form, it must be hedged about with safeguards for free expression. To put it another way, freedom of speech must be the presumption and any limitations would need to be justified on a case by case basis.

Any penalties for breaches of such limitations must be commensurate with the offence. One of the problems with laws of apostasy and of blaspheming in some Islamic nations is their draconian nature and lack of flexibility and judicial discretion. It cannot only be Muslims who are thus protected. In the Islamic world, the urgent need is to protect Christians, Yazidis, Baha’is and Ahmadis from the hatred engendered by textbooks, extremist sermons and pamphleteering.

The tragedies in Paris and Copenhagen should lead us to face these and other issues squarely, not to avoid them simply to maintain social cohesion with our societies or friendly relations with our trading partners. If they are not faced, domestic and international peace will be short-lived.

The post We Cannot Avoid The Battle Over Blasphemy appeared first on Standpoint.

With Islamist terrorist plots now running at more than one a month, the UK counter-terrorism effort can deal only with the crocodiles that are bumping against the boat. So the Home Office is setting up a special unit that will analyse the effectiveness of government measures aimed at “draining the swamp” as the Prime Minister has put it.

The Extremism Analysis Unit (EAU) will be the first of its kind in government to gather empirical evidence about the behaviour and ideologies of extremists. In some ways, this may be even more challenging than the task performed by its companion unit—the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), which analyses intelligence on the terrorist threat. While JTAC’s job is to stop terrorists from killing, the EAU will analyse the extremist spectrum from its violent to its non-violent end. It will also explore the relationship between integration and extremism. 

Many Muslims in Birmingham, Luton, parts of London and the old northern mill towns seem resistant to integrating into the liberal mainstream. More British Muslims have gone to Syria and Iraq than there are Muslims in the British army. I understand that officials have been unable to demonstrate that any initiatives by this government or the last to promote integration have had any beneficial impact.

The EAU will attract controversy because while it will, of course, analyse all sources of extremism, its principal focus will inevitably be on Islamist extremism, because this will pose the greatest threat to national security for the foreseeable future.

The reaction here to the slaughter of 17 people in Paris offers a glimpse into why extremism presents a generational challenge. The journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo magazine were executed for lampooning the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews shopping on the eve of Shabbat just because they were Jews. Paris probably inspired the Danish jihadist last month to target a Copenhagen synagogue killing a Jewish guard after killing a film director at a free speech debate hosted by Lars Vilks the Swedish cartoonist who has also sent up the Prophet.

How do you persuade those British mosques in London and the Midlands reported to have expressed greater offence over Charlie Hebdo‘s cartoons than the fate of the massacred that such attitudes won’t create the common life required for a cohesive, harmonious society? Rather than demonstrate around the Cenotaph against global jihadi terrorism, 1,000 Muslims instead waved banners warning non-Muslims to “be careful with Muhammad”, and telling them to “learn some manners”. 

“Whether Muslim people say it or not, deep down they are probably happy with what happened,” the Muslim manager of a small supermarket in Slough told the BBC Today programme. “Not in the sense of people having lost their lives . . . but in the sense that something needs to be done to stop insulting our Prophet.” The reporter pressed him. “Are you really saying what’s happened [in Paris] has taught those who insult Islam a lesson?” He replied: “To be honest, it’s not as if people are going to be jumping around the streets for joy but (it’s also) not as if people are going to be mourning their deaths, in my opinion.” Some mosque congregations are also reported to have been told that the killers simply could not have been Muslims. Mossad then? 9/11 déjà vu.

On the streets, verbal and physical abuse against both Muslims and Jews is sharply rising, with George Galloway, the Respect MP for Bradford West, claiming that the attacks on the former were “many times more” than the latter. Maybe, but per capita? The British Jewish population is just one tenth of the Muslim population. Galloway’s moral strictures on the evils of anti-Semitism expressed on BBC Question Time last month also sit oddly with his support for Hamas and its genocidal outbursts.

A priority for the EAU should be an examination of the relationship between what the government calls “non-violent extremism” and “violent extremism”. The government’s current Prevent programme is aimed at restricting space for non-violent extremists who ministers say spread hatred and fear. The Prime Minister believes it is this ideology that lies at the root of violent extremism. Islamists not only insist that no such link exists but that to suggest it does represents yet another attack on Islam—”criminalising Islam” as they put it. They argue that the sort of behaviour the government regards as “extreme” is actually representative of orthodox/mainstream Islam.

Such are the claims of clerics like Sheikh Haitham al-Haddad, who espouses an ideological version of puritanical Wahhabi Salafism as practised in, and exported by, Saudi Arabia. In Britain, as in Europe, Salafists are gaining in popularity and influence, particularly among the Islamic societies of our universities.

A staunchly pro-Haddad website called “Islam 21C” describes the Saudi- and SOAS-trained sheikh as “someone well-known for propagating beliefs and practices that enjoy a unanimous consensus among classical schools of Islamic thought, which most Muslims ostensibly claim to follow.” If Haddad does indeed represent mainstream Islam in this country, then we are in trouble.

In his popular and sometimes witty lectures on Islam to mosques, Islamic centres and on satellite TV channels, Haddad disdains Western values. He has described parliamentary democracy as “filthy”, yet encourages his co-religionists to exploit the ballot box for the far-distant but ultimate purpose of establishing a Muslim majority in parliament as a prelude to a caliphate. He has described gender equality as “a very evil thing” and for citizens of Islamic states he advocates the death penalty for apostates (Muslims who leave Islam) and adulterers.

Where does Haddad stand on violent jihad, as opposed to its spiritual version? He argues against Muslims who say that jihad is just “spiritual” inner struggle: this is “not an acceptable opinion whatsoever . . . whether they will take us all to prison, or they don’t, okay, it is up to them . . . this is “part of our deen [religion], yeah?”

To be clear, Haddad does not advocate violent jihad against the UK, or what he defines as innocent civilians. Yet speaking about the Israel-Palestine conflict, he seemed to expand its regional context to a wider one by referring to “the conflict between Islam and the enemies of Islam” as an “ongoing conflict and we should pay the price of this victory from our blood and Muslims are ready to do so”. He went on to say the Israel-Palestine conflict “clearly encouraged all Muslims to prepare themselves for jihad, all Muslims all over the world”.

Another popular Salafist cleric on the speaker circuit is Murtaza Khan, who has likened living in Britain to being “surrounded” by an “epidemic” of “evil”. He laments that too many British Muslims are following one or other of two “accursed nations”. He means Christians and Jews. Khan is an Islamic Studies teacher at a primary school in London and a visiting preacher at East London University. He seems to be permanently on fire, and the sheer aggression of his delivery and words can make the genial but hard-line Haddad look kitten-like by comparison.

Like Haddad, Khan has not advocated violence against his fellow UK citizens, but what might his audience have made of his tirade about the meaning of jihad when he explained that the “glory of the Muslim ummah” [global nation of believers] would only be revived when the “black ink . . . of the scholar” on a map of the world and the “red ink of the martyr . . . are put together”. He said that to restore the map “to its original format [i.e. the Islamic empire] . . . only a few individuals . . . strive to . . . raise the word of Allah once again” but get “blamed” for “encouraging people . . . towards terrorism, towards bloodshed, towards evil action, to upheaval . . . Where is the evidence for this type of belief?”

According to Khan, when Islam finally dominates the map again, he “envisage[s] a beautiful time of victory” when Muslims can be “stern towards the disbelievers” and you will have “the right to show the power and the dominance of Islam. Even walking in the streets you shouldn’t give them way.”

While not advocating violence against UK citizens, it might be thought blindingly obvious that this angry and extreme world view championed by the likes of Khan and Haddad at least helps prepare the ground for violent extremism.

After all, terrorism is not just about violence for a specific purpose. Terrorists always draw on extreme ideology and the British jihadists who have joined IS have justified violence on the grounds of their beliefs. Non-violent extremist clerics like Haddad and Khan share some of the ideology of al-Qaeda and the extremist groups broadly sympathetic to them: namely, a triumphal belief in the superiority of Islam, a duty to work for the re-establishment of a caliphate by uniting Muslims under one interpretation of sharia, contempt for the West and its mores, and support for brutal punishments for “crimes” like adultery and apostasy, regarded in the West as matters of free conscience.

To take just one of those shared beliefs: hostility to our liberal, democratic, capitalist society, a view Salafist speakers often present forcefully to university Islamic societies. In 2008 Professor Martin Innes of Cardiff warned—presciently—that the threat to the UK from jihadist terrorism might increase. His research on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers showed that:

Increasing numbers of young Muslim people are becoming sufficiently disaffected with their lives in liberal-democratic-capitalist societies that they might be willing to support violent terrorism to articulate their disillusionment and disengagement.

Do those who discount a relationship between non-violent extremism and violent extremism believe that sentiments like Haddad’s about democracy being “filthy” are likely to dispel, or exacerbate that “disillusionment and disengagement”?

Still, the Salafists rely heavily on a recent report from the former editor of Race and Class, now lecturing in terrorism studies at John Jay College, New York. Professor Arun Kundnani is also the author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror. He says the idea that terrorism is caused by extremism—as defined by opposition to British values—”does not stand up to scholarly scrutiny.”

Kundnani has set up a straw man. For he also says that the “factors which lead someone to commit acts of terrorism are complex and cannot be reduced to holding a set of values deemed to be radical.” No one has said otherwise.

A sense of alienation fostering an identity crisis, absence of role models, foreign policy—all can interact with theo-political factors without pushing a person into violence. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, has said as much. But as she also says, the “damage” caused by non-violent extremism that “promotes intolerance, hatred and a sense of superiority over others . . . is reason enough to act. And there is, undoubtedly, a thread that binds” these beliefs “to the actions of those who want to impose their values on us through violence”.

Kundnani appears to want to erase this ideological thread from the equation entirely. If not ideology, then what drives the thousands of Muslim youths from Muslim countries—some of them under the control of sharia—to become terrorists?

Kundnani’s paper has been published and promoted by an organisation called Claystone Associates, which says it is an “an independent think tank formed to offer research, analysis and reasoned solutions to foster social cohesion in relation to Muslims in Britain”.

How “independent”? One of Claystone’s directors is also a main writer for Islam 21C, which says it is the “flagship website of the Muslim Research & Development Foundation (MRDF).” Until March 2014, MRDF’s managing director was Haitham Haddad. It is hard not to see Kundnani’s paper as part of an attempt to rehabilitate ideological Salafism as mainstream Islam in Britain today.

And Islam finds it hard to reconcile itself to being a minority. As the late Zaki Badawi, founder and principal of the Muslim College in London, said, Islam has an inherent drive for expansion beyond spiritual into politics, society and law: “A proselytising religion cannot stand still. It can either expand or contract. Islam endeavours to expand in Britain.”

For the benefit of the wider Muslim community in Britain, there is a pressing need to settle this dispute between the government and Islamists over whether non-violent extremism helps push Muslims into violent extremism. The battle lines have been too fuzzy for too long. They urgently need clarifying to allow an open and honest debate, based on hard evidence.

Following the slaughter over Charlie Hebdo, four British Muslims went on a BBC Panorama documentary that I presented to explain why they believed the government was right—that their non- violent but extreme co-religionists were taking Muslims to the front door of violent extremists who then opened it. Whether they go through that door can also depend on the other factors I have mentioned.

The response was a fusillade of vicious personal insults at these Muslim interviewees. Bad manners again got the better of “Islamic etiquette”. Some of this abuse was also irresponsible. Abu Eesa, an imam and lecturer, implied the interviewees were “apostates”. In the current febrile climate, it is not fantasy to fear a fanatic might try to impose the death penalty. A poll has suggested that a third of young British Muslims support execution for apostates. Abu Eesa also complained that under the Prevent programme “scholars [presumably like Haitham Haddad and Murtaza Khan] cannot express basic Islamic facts to those willing to better themselves”.

That is untrue. There is no law against saying that gender equality is “evil” or that homosexuals are worse than “animals” or that democracy is “filthy” or that apostates should be executed. Nor should there be—and if the government’s Counter Terrorism Bill does restrict the expression of such beliefs, that would be like poking a beehive and would be unwise. Yet it’s happened because the government believes the Muslim community has shown itself to be incapable or unwilling to put its own house in order.

Where then, does the organisation that claims to most widely represent Islam in Britain stand on the impact of non-violent extremism?

The Muslim Council of Britain’s (MCB) secretary-general is a physician, Dr Shuja Shafi. He is reported to have said he has “no idea” why some young people become radicalised. That hasn’t stopped the MCB from saying what they don’t think causes radicalisation.

Like the Salafists, the MCB says there is no evidential link between the government’s definition of non-violent extremism and violent extremism. It also says there is no justification for the Prevent programme to focus on Muslims when “the vast majority of terrorist attacks in EU countries have for years been perpetrated by separatist organisations, with less than 2 per cent being by Muslims”. They point to an EU Europol report which says that two out of 152 terrorist attacks in 2013 were “religiously motivated”.

Aside from the fact that Prevent does address all sources of extremism, what the MCB does not mention are the 216 arrested for religiously inspired attacks in 2013. This figure also appears to exclude the UK, which would boost it appreciably. Nor does the MCB mention that attacks from separatist organisations have decreased significantly and that 41 of these can be attributed to dissident republicans in Northern Ireland. Nor, unlike violent jihadists, do separatists go for mass casualty attacks. They tend to target infrastructure and, unlike jihadists, they pursue a limited goal of separatism—not changing the fabric of society or way of life in the West.

Nor does the MCB agree with the government as to what constitutes extremism. Two official inquiries into the so-called “Trojan Horse” plot affecting 16 Birmingham state schools found evidence of Muslim children being warned not to listen to Christians because they were “all liars”, how they were “lucky to be Muslims and not ignorant like Christians or Jews”, of children being warned they would go to hell if they didn’t pray, of segregation, of homophobia, a hard-line curriculum, contempt for the armed forces and even scepticism about the near-beheading of Drummer Lee Rigby and American civilians killed by the Boston nail bombers. Yet the MCB dismissed most of this bigotry as merely evidence of “conservative Muslim practices”.

At a recent London conference of head teachers, Muslim boys were reported to have turned their backs on girls dancing in a school performance and insisted that they needed to leave their classrooms in the middle of lessons in order to pray at set times.

Dr Shafi is reported to have supported the boys, only conceding that they should have adopted school rules after repeated questioning. Is it any wonder that those children opposed the British value of tolerance? Yet one can only imagine the furore had the head tried to enforce school rules with detention.

I have never heard the MCB condemn the bigoted beliefs which non-violent Salafists like Haddad and Khan proclaim as mainstream Islam. They agree with the Salafists that the current Prevent programme should be closed down. And like the Salafists-and other Islamists—they have a reflex tendency to dismiss criticism of such beliefs as “Islamophobic” and motivated by a right-wing “neo-con” agenda.The problem is that Islamists don’t seem to know their Left from their Right. And we don’t help by calling them “radical”. The broad spectrum of Islamist ideology is not radical. In its views about equality, women, gays, freedom of conscience, and the economy, Islamism is, in fact, regressive and right-wing.

If you want to know just how much our deference to Islamic sensibilities has muddled our Left-Right thinking, look no further than the current “Stand Up To Racism” campaign, sponsored by the MCB, trade unions and the Communist newspaper the Morning Star. One of its speakers last month was billed as Shakeel Begg, for the past 14 years the chief imam of the Lewisham Islamic Centre in south London.

Some of the speakers whom Begg’s Islamic Centre has given a platform to are very regressive indeed. Like the Saudi cleric Sheikh Muhammad Salih Al-Munajjid, who runs an online Q&A about Islam. Asked online what should be the punishment for gays, the sheikh quoted sacred texts saying they should be burned, or “thrown from a high place, then have stones thrown at them”.

Islamic State literally enforces this. A man in his fifties, said to be gay, was recently thrown off a seven-storey building by IS. He survived the fall, only for a baying mob to finish him off with stones.

Again quoting from sacred texts, here’s what the sheikh says about taking non-Muslims as friends: “Allah forbids all this.” Why? Because Muslims are “forbidden” from appointing kaafirs [disbelievers] to positions where they might “find out the secrets of the Muslims and plot against them by trying to do all kinds of harm” like “bring[ing] our children up as kaafirs“.

Why would Shakeel Begg, the imam of an Islamic Centre in London, which has given a platform for clerics like Sheikh Al-Munajjid, Murtaza Khan, Haitham Haddad and other regressives be seen by the “Stand Up To Racism” campaign as a champion of progressive thinking?

The premise on which this far-right Islamist alliance with the British Left and far-Left is based seems bogus. The Islamists need the support of Britain’s Left to mainstream themselves, while the Left has needed the Islamists to inject new revolutionary life into last-century Marxism.

We need to change the language. The Beggs, Haddads and Khans of this world aren’t radicals. The radicals are the four Muslims who appeared on Panorama challenging their regressive ideas, precisely because they are the progressives.

All four were observant Muslims in their own right and they dared to speak the truth that too often has not dared speak its name: that violent extremism is evidence of a terrible schism within Islam. Politicians reach out to Muslims after every major atrocity by emphasising that it has “nothing to do with Islam”, but rather, a “poisonous ideology.” This reflex is a measure of how successful the Islamist-propagated catchphrase “religion of peace” (like “Islamophobia”) has become. And of course as a personal faith rather than a political ideology Islam is genuinely a religion of peace for many millions of Muslims. Yet people aren’t stupid. They wonder why—if all that can be said about this ideological version of Islam is that it’s “poisonous”—its believers keep coming back to the religious texts.

The fact of the matter is that the Prophet Muhammad was a warrior and the Koran does contain many passages which, if taken literally, sanction the foulest deeds imaginable. The Koran also contains passages that furnish the basis for religious pluralism. The problem is there has never been an exclusive truth about how to interpret these conflicting narratives in the 21st century from Islam’s two prime sources—the Koran and the Hadiths.

The near daily news of atrocities across the world committed in the name of Islam may have nothing to do with traditional or classical Sunni jurisprudence. But the gap between those traditionalists and the Islamists has been growing for more than a century and it has accelerated more recently. Until that gap is closed, there will continue to be a “problem with Islam”.

Baroness Warsi, who resigned last year as minister for faith and communities, says she wants the government to engage with a wider cross-section of Muslims, rather than only the “dozen people” who agree with it. She urges ministers to re-engage with the MCB. Yet she also acknowledges that the MCB “continues to produce a leadership that is neither equipped to represent, nor is genuinely reflective of, the contemporary aspirations of large sections of British Muslim communities”. So what exactly is there to re-engage with?

The Baroness also says that Muslims will speak up for British values only when they know their concerns will be heard. Yet since 9/11 we have heard little else but these concerns from Muslim community leaders, while the rest of us are waiting to hear more of those voices that spoke out on Panorama. We know there are many more but they fear the abuse they know will be heaped upon them. There is also a natural reluctance to fracture the unity forged by faith, and a sense of being under siege. “The problem is they get stuck in the Muslim First camp,” a Muslim friend told me. Not for much longer, we must hope. We risk becoming a very fractured society and we are running out of time. 

The post Inside The World Of ‘Non-Violent’ Islamism appeared first on Standpoint.

A new book has now emerged, On Rock or Sand? Firm Foundations for Britain’s Future, edited by the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, explicitly harking back to the earlier one. Regretting, in his own words, that “on facing savage attacks [on Faith in the City] not only by those in the government of the day but also by other powerful figures in society, the Church leadership then lost its nerve and moved on to internal ‘churchy’ matters”, he presents the new book as the Church of England having regained its nerve.

On Rock or Sand? (SPCK, £9.99) may not be quite as bad as its predecessor, but Archbishop Sentamu’s contribution, the lengthiest in the book, is fundamentally flawed. His overriding concern is with inequality, of the extent of poverty in what is, overall, a relatively prosperous society. The flaw—surprising in one who originally hails from overseas—is that he presents this solely as a British phenomenon, seemingly unaware that studies by the International Monetary Fund and others have clearly shown that, throughout the developed world, inequality (as officially measured) has been gradually rising for the past 30 years or so, under a wide variety of governments and policies.

So there is nothing unusual about the British experience, nor can it be attributed to the policies of the present UK government. Indeed, the most recent official figures suggest that, over the past few years, income inequality in the UK (unlike in most other countries) has lessened slightly. There are clearly larger forces at work affecting us all, of which modern technology and globalisation are two of the most important; and most people, sensibly, would not wish to turn their backs on either. It is, of course, understandable that at a time of recession inequality causes more resentment than it does when overall prosperity is growing—which, happily, in the UK it now is. It is also understandable that at a time of recession there is increased resentment at the extent of tax avoidance by the rich. But that is a separate issue.

According to the leftist French economist Thomas Piketty, who has written a best-selling (if little read) big book on the subject, the explanation of growing inequality worldwide is that the return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth. This dubious generalisation is not only based on flawed statistical evidence but ignores the extent to which the return on capital reflects risk. Be that as it may, his proposed remedy is a swingeing tax on high incomes, worldwide. My own experience is that, when as Chancellor I sharply reduced the tax on high incomes in the late 1980s, the yield actually rose, giving me more scope for helping the poor through public expenditure. The only sufferers were the accountancy firms and tax lawyers, who had been doing very well advising the rich how to reduce their tax bills. Needless to say my heart bled for them, but I felt they would survive.

I was also aware of the observation of the eminent development economist, Professor Peter Bauer, that you do not make the poor rich by making the rich poor. The bottom line is that we need to focus more on policies that relieve poverty, rather than attempt to reduce—or is it eliminate?—inequality.

Be that as it may, Archbishop Sentamu is not only seemingly unaware that the rising inequality which exercises him is a global, not a British, phenomenon. He is also, surprisingly (although this is true also of Piketty), apparently unaware of a much more important feature of the past 30 years, namely the progressive reduction in inequality between the developed and developing worlds. As a result of the belated discovery by most of the developing world that the liberal market capitalist economy, for all its undoubted flaws (for that is the nature of mankind), is the only high road to material prosperity, and greatly assisted by globalisation, the gap between living standards in the developing world and in the developed world is steadily narrowing, a welcome process that seems likely to continue.

It is true, of course, that inequality within the developing world is considerably greater than in the developed world, and is probably growing faster. Nevertheless, a world in which extreme poverty is perceptibly diminishing, and inequality reducing on the global scale, while by no means perfect (nothing is), does not seem to me too bad. There are certainly far worse things to worry about.

Archbishop Sentamu’s ignorance or neglect of what has been happening beyond our own shores, however, is one thing. What surprised me more was the contribution of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to the book. I have a high regard for Justin Welby. We worked closely together, for more than a year, as members of the Parliamentary Banking Commission, under the outstanding chairmanship of Andrew Tyrie MP. Indeed, it was on my suggestion that (as Bishop of Durham) he was invited to join the Commission in the first place. Moreover, he is unusual among the bishops and archbishops to have had a successful business career before entering the Church, having been a highly-regarded group treasurer of Enterprise Oil, trading oil derivatives with the best of them. (Curiously enough, Enterprise Oil was a company which in a sense I created, when, as Energy Secretary, I forced the then state-owned British Gas Corporation to disgorge its North Sea oil interests, which I then privatised under that name.)

At the heart of Archbishop Welby’s contribution there is the following bewildering passage: “We believe that if we can fix the economy, the fixing of human beings will automatically follow. That is a lie. It is a lie because it is a narrative that casts money, rather than humanity, as the protagonist of God’s story.”

I have to say that, in a rather long lifetime either observing or participating in politics and public life, I have never come across anyone who believes that “if we can fix the economy, the fixing of human beings will automatically follow”. With great respect, the only proposition close to a “lie” is to assert that “we” do believe that. We certainly believe that it is an obligation on governments to try and “fix” the economy to the extent that they are able to do so: the people, rightly, expect no less. But insofar as this is connected to the “fixing” of human beings (a much more difficult task) the relationship in fact flows in the opposite direction.

For example, the full name of the Commission on which Justin Welby and I sat was the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards; and “standards” referred to standards of behaviour, a cultural and ethical matter which was at the heart of the banking meltdown of 2008 and which had had such disastrous economic consequences. As I wrote in the updated version of my memoirs some five years ago, “While New Labour’s system of bank supervision and regulation was a disaster, that is in no way to deny that the root cause of the crisis lay in the greed and folly of all too many bankers, in the broadest sense of the term.”

This is certainly a difficult area. The ability of politicians and governments in a free society to influence human behaviour and promote ethical standards is limited. And it is significant that the great Adam Smith, author of both The Theory of Moral Sentiments, an analysis of man as a moral being, and The Wealth of Nations, an analysis of man as an economic being, spent most of the rest of his days vainly trying to write a synthesis of the two.

But the claim that “we” believe that by “fixing” the economy we can “fix” human beings, and that this alleged belief has anything whatsoever to do with the problems that face us, is absurd and unhelpful. Archbishop Welby may well have a point when he complains that “our greatly secularised society seems to agree on only one, quite un-Christian principle: that it’s every person for themselves”; but that clearly doesn’t apply to the political class. Unlike in some other countries, few in Britain enter politics in order to enrich themselves, nor (unless they become Prime Minister) do they do so.

As I have observed elsewhere, there has indeed been a damaging cultural change, which has undoubtedly made a contribution to the banking disaster in particular. In the old days, bankers’ greed and folly was to a considerable extent kept in check by the fear of loss of reputation if things went wrong: a powerful spur to banking prudence and rectitude. But we now appear to live in an age in which the acquisition of wealth counts for more than reputation. The archbishops would have done better to have addressed themselves to how this might be reversed. But then that would have been much harder.

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Yet doctrine, “teaching” or “that which is taught”, implies, like the cognate term “doctor”, worldly as well as spiritual authority. When the University of Oxford awards degrees, the Vice-Chancellor and his Proctors address the new graduate as Domine or Magister (“lord” or “master”). Popes are symbolised by (and until St John XXIII regularly wore) a triple crown, indicating their teaching authority, their Magisterium, over secular rulers; “Professor” takes precedence over other titles, even inherited ones; “Rabbi” carries a similar prestige. Those entitled to teach on behalf of a religion wield a unique kind of authority and their influence may be political no less than spiritual.

How then may the arbiters and exponents of doctrine be persuaded to soften their orthodoxy sufficiently to open up a space in which competing claims to truth may be resolved or not, as the case may be, but in any case without bloodshed? The greatest religious thinkers may range freely across an intellectual terrain they have made their own, but lesser minds tend to stick rigidly to rules and to the literal interpretation of scripture. The deadening effects of the latter are the reason why terms such as “doctrinaire” and “dogmatic” have acquired such negative significance. It is sometimes the case that the doctrinaire and the dogmatic elements within a faith community restrict, censor or even excommunicate the freer, more creative spirits. But it is also true that when the doctrines of the free spirit depart too radically from orthodoxy, perhaps in the attempt to achieve ecumenical goals, then the charge of heresy may indeed be justified and a parting of the ways becomes inevitable. The new doctrine either dies with its originator, or becomes the seed of a new religion. The distinctions between Sunni and Shiite, or between Catholic and Protestant, may have grown more entrenched over the centuries, but at their origins were genuine theological disputes. The Inquisition’s most notorious case, against Galileo, was not against his discoveries but his adherence to a theory, Copernican heliocentrism, which not even the greatest of contemporary astronomers, Tycho Brahe, had been able to test to his satisfaction. One may deplore the anathematisation of Spinoza by the Amsterdam Jewish community, but his critiques of Biblical and Halachic authority were indubitably heterodox. In all these cases, the forces of change were resisted by the religious establishment on perfectly rational grounds. We must not expect anything to be different today — except that secular establishments are apt to be at least as protective of their ideological purity as religious ones are of doctrinal orthodoxy.

The time-honoured method by which antagonistic doctrines may be obliged to acknowledge one another is dialogue. Already in the Middle Ages we hear of disputations between representatives of the world religions at the courts of Mongol khans and other oriental potentates. But ecumenical encounters are evidently older than that. There are examples of them throughout the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament accounts of the interrogation of Jesus by Pontius Pilate show that pagans and Jews were accustomed to hold religious dialogues even in the most improbable circumstances.

It is worth dwelling on that particular dialogue, in the version handed down by St John’s Gospel, because it anticipates so many of today’s problems. Pilate asks Jesus: “Art thou a King then?” Jesus answers: “Thou sayest that I am a King. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth: every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.” Pilate replies with a question: “What is truth?” But he does not wait for an answer.

Now, every religion makes strong claims to truth — not merely a truth but the truth. For this reason, no religion can be comfortable with epistemological relativism. In 2002, the then Chief Rabbi Jonathan (now Lord) Sacks published The Dignity of Difference, subtitled How to avoid the Clash of Civilisations, in which he sought to establish a framework for different faiths to live alongside one another and engage in dialogue, while acknowledging that their rival truth claims could not be reconciled. However, his fellow Orthodox rabbis were unhappy with some of the book’s formulations, which in their view went too far and could be interpreted as relativising the truth claims of Judaism. Sacks agreed to rewrite an entire chapter to meet their concerns. For example, in the first edition we read: “[Judaism] believes in one God, but not in one religion, one culture, one truth. The God of Abraham is the God of all mankind, but the faith of Abraham is not the faith of all mankind.” In the second edition, this has been changed to: “[Judaism] believes in one God but not in one exclusive path to salvation. The God of the Israelites is the God of all mankind, but the demands that are made of the Israelites are not made of all mankind.”

Sacks claimed that, for Jews, there was nothing controversial in his main argument — that the Abrahamic monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have a theological basis for mutual respect, based not on relativism but on the common concept of covenant. Evidently, though, the notion that Jews do not believe in one universal truth was highly controversial. The fact that Judaism does not claim exclusivity in seeking salvation does not mean that its truth claims are not absolute.

It has become impolite, even taboo, to point out the incompatibility of such religious truth claims. In a recent column, the Catholic writer Piers Paul Read criticised an American Jewish friend who had rewritten in Hebrew the Latin texts of the B Minor Mass to produce “the Jewish Bach”. The fact that this project made him feel “profoundly uneasy” implied, wrote Read, that he was not truly ecumenical. While acknowledging the decrees of the Second Vatican Council, enjoining Catholics to treat “our older brothers in the faith” with respect, Read is dismayed by the Jewish rejection of Jesus. He suspects that “were I not a Catholic, I would not believe in God”. Quoting Blaise Pascal, Read accepts that “true Christians and true Jews have only one religion”, but that does not resolve the stark choice: either Jesus Christ is the Messiah, or he is not. For him “the question to be answered is whether what [religions] teach is true and, like Pascal, the only God I can believe in is the God foretold by the Jewish prophets and revealed by Christ.”

I find Read’s frankness refreshing, although I suspect that he and Rabbi Sacks would in practice find a great deal in common. Catholics and Jews, at any rate if they are orthodox, both take doctrine, prayer and ritual seriously; they have survived for so long precisely because they maintain unambiguous criteria for membership. It is, indeed, the clear demarcation between these two orthodoxies that has helped to make dialogue between them so fruitful. The documents Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate, issued by the Second Vatican Council half a century ago, were the product of decades of dialogue between Catholic theologians, several of them converts from Judaism, and Jews, including the Holocaust survivor Jules Isaac, who made an impassioned appeal to Pope John XXIII at an audience in 1960 to abandon the teaching of contempt for the “blindness” of Jews.

The language of these documents was fiercely fought over at the Council and repays close reading. Of the Jews Lumen Gentium says that “this people remains most dear to God, for God does not repent of the gifts he makes nor of the calls he issues”, a direct quotation from Romans 11:29. Lumen Gentium goes on to acknowledge that “the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator . . . Nor does Divine Providence deny the helps necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God”. In other words, the council abrogated the Augustinian dictum: Salus extra ecclesiam non est (“there is no salvation outside the Church”). In Nostra Aetate, the council fathers went further, explicitly condemning “hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism directed against Jews at any time and by anyone”. They abandoned the ancient accusation of deicide “against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today . . . the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.” As John Connelly points out in his book From Enemy to Brother, the German Cardinal Bea, who oversaw the drafting of Nostra Aetate, had advocated precisely these ideas until the early 1960s: “Cardinal Bea found a new language to talk about Jews only after he began talking to Jews.” Doctrine and dialogue exist in a delicate symbiosis.

Not surprisingly, these declarations and others like them since have not been universally popular among some Christians, who cling to “supersessionist” interpretations of the New Testament. Others are hostile to the State of Israel, identifying the Church with the Palestinian cause while ignoring the global persecution of Christians by Islam. The Vatican has not been immune to such attitudes, yet successive popes, beginning with John XXIII but especially the Polish, German and Argentine Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis, have taken great care to maintain and expand Judaeo-Christian dialogue.

What we have not seen, however, is any sustained attempt to deepen the exegesis of the key text for Catholic-Jewish theology: St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, especially chapters nine to 11. As we have seen, the council fathers drew on Paul’s language, but the deepest question remains unresolved: that of salvation. Paul writes in Romans 11:25-26: “For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved.” Paul appears to be prophesying that the Jews “in part” have been ordained to remain outside the elect until the Church has accomplished its mission to the Gentiles, but that nevertheless God is bound to keep his promise that the Jewish people as a whole, converted or not, will ultimately attain salvation.

Paul — himself a Jew, a Roman citizen, and the apostle of the Gentiles — implies that the distinction between Jew and non-Jew will disappear at the end of time — but not before. “I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin . . . For if the casting away of them [Israel] be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?” The Jews, in the New Testament, are still God’s means to save all mankind — just as they always were in the Hebrew Bible. The Jewish rejection of the Gospel has not altered their providential function, nor their prospect of redemption.

In grappling with this Pauline doctrine, two great German-speaking Jesuit theologians, Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, have contributed important but contrasting ideas. To Rahner we owe the idea of the “anonymous Christian”, the person outside the Church who by God’s grace attains salvation through following the dictates of his conscience. As we have seen, the Second Vatican Council implicitly adopted this idea of “inclusivism”, stating in Gaudium et Spes that “the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery”. Balthasar, however, is sceptical about what he calls “a superficial ecumenism”. He rejects the notion of “an invisible church which would be the true Catholic church permeating all confessions, and a visible church which is just one of many variants of being Christian”. However, for Balthasar even those who have turned away from God are not wholly beyond hope — because Christ has been there before them, having descended into hell after his crucifixion. “Even what we call ‘hell’ is, although it is the place of desolation, always still a Christological place.” Balthasar spent many years in dialogue with the great Jewish sage Martin Buber, and his struggle to make sense of the Epistle to the Romans influenced his entire theology of history. God’s mercy, Paul tells us, embraces the whole Jewish people, not just the “remnant” who converted to Christianity. And this insuperable fact of the universality of God’s mercy led Balthasar towards his most controversial teaching: that humanity as a whole, Jews and Gentiles, will ultimately be saved — that hell, in other words, is empty.

This doctrine of universal salvation finds resistance in Western Christianity, with its emphasis on free will and responsibility, but the hope that all shall be saved is an old one, expressed by the Greek Orthodox concept of apokatastasis, the eschatological “restitution” of all things. This is close to the Jewish notion of tikkun olam, or “healing the world”. Rahner’s doctrine of the anonymous Christian and Balthasar’s doctrine of universal salvation offer contrasting but compatible solutions to the problem with which we began: the problem of truth.

Each of the last three popes has had Jewish interlocutors and friends among the rabbinate, but none has been closer than the relationship between Pope Francis and Rabbi Abraham Skorka. Francis, according to Skorka, “feels us [Jews] to be at the root of his belief”. The two Argentines have found enough common spiritual ground to be able to live with the competing truth claims of their respective religions. Each of them, the Jesuit and the Jew, is confident that they are on the same side. Doctrinal orthodoxy matters, for without it neither would be sure enough of his own ground to be able to step onto the other’s. But doctrine is not all that matters. There is a truth that respects and transcends doctrinal differences, the truth that Paul sought to articulate in his paean of praise to the Jewish people in Romans 9:4: “To them pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises . . .” No Christian ought ever to speak to or about Jews without such respect, never forgetting that Jesus was Jewish not only in flesh and blood but in his teaching. The imitation of Christ is therefore, in some unfathomable but deeply significant sense, the act of drawing closer to and identifying with the Jewish people.

We have seen how doctrinal differences may sometimes develop through dialogue to the point where they are transcended by a higher order of truth. The theological issues that provoked the Reformation — justification by faith alone, purgatory and predestination, the priesthood of all believers — all turned on the interpretation of Pauline Scripture. None is now seen as an insuperable stumbling block by most Protestant or Catholic theologians. The question of salvation is central here, too: neither side now sees damnation as the price of error. These doctrinal differences have been transcended by ecumenical dialogue, stimulated by the mutual respect due to those martyred by the Nazis such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Edith Stein, to the point where five years ago a German Pope, Benedict XVI, could celebrate Martin Luther at the reformer’s Augustinian convent in Erfurt.

So there are parallels with the Catholic-Jewish relationship. Such doctrinal differences have, however, been superseded by new truth claims: in the case of Protestants and Catholics, by sharply different attitudes to sex and the family or to the role of women in the Church; in the case of Jews and Christians, disputes over Israel and the Palestinians. These arguments are no longer about who is to be saved and who damned in the next world, but who is to be damned in this one.

Above all, we cannot leave Islam out of account. Whereas dialogue between Catholics, other Christians and Jews is generally conducted in a civilised way, attempts to reach out to the Muslim world have often been rebuffed. This is not for want of trying. Pope John Paul II visited the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, an ancient centre of Sunni Islam, in May 2001, and kissed the Koran — something that would once have been unthinkable. Four months later came 9/11. Then in 2006 Benedict XVI gave his Regensburg lecture, which quoted the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus condemning Muhammad for imposing Islam by force. An unfortunate translation rendered the sentence thus: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find only things evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith that he preached.” Even though the Pope had declared the Emperor’s formulation “unacceptable” and the words “evil and inhuman” were swiftly corrected to “bad and inhumane”, the reaction across the Muslim world was one of violence, not least against priests and nuns. The Pope’s apology was not accepted by many Muslim authorities, but later there were overtures from Islamic clerics which have opened up the possibility of dialogue. When Benedict visited Turkey, he called for “authentic dialogue between Christians and Muslims, based on truth and inspired by a sincere wish to know one another better, respecting differences and recognising what we have in common.” Pope Francis has continued the quest for authentic dialogue, but so far there has been little or no willingness by Muslim leaders to promote reciprocity of religious freedom. Under Islam, Jews and Christians continue to suffer legal discrimination, violent persecution and even genocide.

As long as truth is sought by the light of reason, doctrinal commitments and differences do not preclude dialogue between religions. Violence, however, renders impossible what Martin Buber called the Ich-Du (“I-Thou”) relationship — a relationship that sees the image of God in every human being. The revealed truth that Jews and Christians in their different ways express in doctrine and practice is enriched by dialogue, because in the human encounter with the other faith we also catch glimpses of the divine encounter we all seek. Reaching out to Muslims is an imperative for Jews and Christians only in the absence of violence. Mutual respect requires mutual toleration; religious reciprocity is not a favour but a right. The only consolation is that persecution has drawn Jews and Christians closer than ever before. As the Prophet Amos says, “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” Jews and Christians should at least agree on this: that we like to walk together — so much, indeed, that we will never again be parted.

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Right now American Christians increasingly feel they are losing. With the media stoking the culture wars, many people of faith, pulverised by hostile campaign groups and feeling betrayed by the government, think their whole way of life is under attack. The atmosphere has changed; that’s their sense of it. It has turned hostile, and quickly. A florist in Washington state and a baker in Colorado have been sued for refusing to arrange flowers and bake cakes for same-sex marriages. In their defence they appealed to religious liberty. Why? Because religious liberty is for losers. Last month, the California state university system, comprising 450,000 students on 23 campuses, banned access to Christian student ministries for not allowing non-Christian leaders. This past summer President Obama signed an executive order on LGBT discrimination among federal contractors, sweeping aside the historic exemption for religious organisations.

The apparent novelty of these trends can seem intimidating. It’s therefore worth framing this set of issues — culture wars, legal battles, clashes of rights — by seeking an historical perspective on the intriguing dynamic that communities learn something profound about liberty via the concrete experiences of suffering its loss. Iraq is a case in point, with the fate of the Shias under Saddam Hussein and more recently the Sunnis, not to mention Christians and other minorities. But turning to Europe, modern Catholicism supplies perhaps the most dramatic example. How did an institution adamantly opposed to religious liberty in 1800 become one of its leading advocates by 2000?

A profound comment by an important but much neglected Catholic historian is a good launchpad. After founding the first Catholic democratic party in 1919, the Partito Popolare Italiano, Sicilian priest Luigi Sturzo was outmaneuvered by Mussolini and fled to England. There, in 1939, he published his landmark book Church and State. At one point he proffers this reflection on the relationship between modern Catholicism and religious freedom. At the beginning of the 1800s, the Catholic Church “had been against the introduction of political liberties”. Yet “in the following period of veiled or open separation and strife the Church was compelled by events to demand these liberties for herself . . . if she would carry on her religious activity”. He continues:

But liberties are coherent or they cannot exist; if they were denied to the Church as the adversary of the State, they would soon be denied to all who were considered as adversaries of the State, till they became the monopoly of the Government . . . If on the other hand the Church demands them for herself, she admits or supposes that such liberties are general for all.

For Sturzo, the story of modern Catholicism is of a Church brought to its senses by being brought to its knees. The Church learns from being on the losing side, and what it learns is the necessary reciprocity of religious freedom. If the Church demands them for herself she must “suppose that such liberties are general for all”. Yet is Sturzo’s narrative too neat? Is the shift from the descriptive — what did happen — to the normative — what should have happened — too easy? Or does he get the story right?

The historical period Sturzo starts with, when the Church “had been against the introduction of political liberties”, is the Bourbon Restoration. After the paroxysms of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the Great Powers attempted to turn the clock back and reestablish the theocratic union of throne and altar. It was a doomed project, but one attempted nonetheless. In France, no sooner was the church reinstated to its unassailable position than it clamped down on religious freedom for non-adherents. In 1818 Protestants who refused to decorate their houses for processions of the Blessed Sacrament were prosecuted.

Meanwhile, in Italy religious freedom was even more grossly restricted. “There is no clearer way to discover the popes’ attitudes and policies towards the Jews,” remarks historian David Kertzer, “than seeing how the popes dealt with them when they had the power to do what they liked.” The power to do what they liked was restored to the popes with the return of their lands in 1815. To avoid, as an internal Inquisition report put it, “the danger of the perversion of the Catholic faithful”, the popes shamefully set about segregating Jews and Christians. Jews were forced into overcrowded, disease-ridden ghettos and banned from owning property outside them. In Rome they were forced to listen to sermons. When this persecution was questioned, Pope Gregory XVI retorted: “Disorders such as [Jews settling among Christians], while they may be illegally tolerated in secular states, cannot be tolerated in the Ecclesiastical state.” A pure theocracy meant no place for religious liberty.

Yet while the Church opposed religious freedom in countries where it held sway, in other European countries it was Catholics who found themselves the losers. In 1800, Britain’s union with Ireland massively inflated the nation’s Catholic population, rendering increasingly intolerable the injustice of the exclusion of Catholics from the political process. Across the channel, when the Dutch monarch William I absorbed Belgium into Holland in 1815, Calvinists seized control of education, to the chagrin of Catholics. Under Russian rule the Catholic Church in Poland was denied self-government.

This contradiction did not escape notice, provoking a powerful internal challenge to the Church. It came from a French Catholic priest, Félicité de Lamennais, and the movement he founded from the 1820s onwards. Vexed by what he did not hesitate to call “the murder of Poland, the dismemberment of Belgium and the conduct of governments which call themselves liberal”, Lamennais called on all Catholic nations to unite behind the cause of religious freedom “and the political liberties which are inseparable from them”. Why did this task fall above all to Catholics? Because, Lamennais declared, “they have greater need of it than all others”. He looked out across Europe and saw in how many places the losers were Catholics.

In his greatest rallying cry, the manifesto he entitled the “Act of Union”, Lamennais made two arguments which are remarkably salient today. First, ridding a society of theocratic rule does not mean questioning the public presence of the Church. On the contrary, Lamennais contended that freedom of religion must be shored up by freedom of education and association. Second, Catholics could not limit freedom “to their own religious beliefs”. He went on: “In each constitutional state, the rights which [Catholics] defend are the public rights of all their fellow-citizens.” Lamennais had hit upon what Sturzo calls the “coherence” or reciprocity of rights.

When Lamennais ventured to Rome to persuade the Pope in person, however, his plea for pluralism fell on deaf ears. Gregory XVI thundered against “the erroneous proposition which claims liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone”. Even though “some repeat over and over again with the greatest imprudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it”, one should expect nothing more from freedom of opinion than “transformation of minds, corruption of youth, contempt of sacred things and holy law”.

Lamennais took that as a “no”.

So Rome refused to learn from the experience of losing — in England, Belgium and then Poland — and ignored Lamennais’ challenge. Yet it was not long before the Church again suffered strife, again finding herself, in Sturzo’s words, “compelled by events to demand these liberties for herself”.

In Germany, Bismarck famously initiated the Kulturkampf, or “culture war”, in the 1870s. His symbolic exclusion of Catholics from national culture was motivated in part by a view of Catholicism as a foil to modernity, an impediment to progress. Religious orders were banned, seminaries shut down, and the civil service cleansed of Catholics.

But persecution would not be confined to countries where Catholics were a minority. In France, the longer the Third Republic lasted, the more aggressive the policy of laïcité became. In 1901 the government passed a law of association requiring religious orders to gain residency permits in order to exist. Few of these permits were then granted. Becoming prime minister a year later Émile Combes closed 13,000 of France’s 16,000 religious schools, boasting of his agenda:

Unlike the Catholic priest anathematising dissent from his bully pulpit — do we [not] impose upon others our rule of conduct and way of thinking . . . All we ask of religion — because we are entitled to do so — is that it keeps within its temples, that it limit its instruction to the faithful, and that it refrain from unwarrantable interference in the civil and political domain.

It was the Church’s public presence, its outward-facing ministry, Combes could not and did not abide — precisely what Lamennais had shrewdly realised any defence of religious liberty needed to cover.

This time the Church was ready to learn from losing. The paradigm shift really begins with the remarkable pontificate of Leo XIII (1878-1903). The rise of the nation state, and then its turn against Catholicism, caused Leo fundamentally to rethink the freedom of the Church. But logically this meant rethinking not just the periods when the Church had suffered at the state’s hands but also the times when the Church had benefited from an all-too-close relationship with it. What did it really mean to maintain a proper distinction between the temporal and spiritual realms? And when the Church had drawn upon coercive force had it honoured that distinction? Leo began to think it had not, famously telling French Catholics intent on overthrowing the secular Third Republic (and crowning a new Christian Bourbon king through whom the church could rule once more) that their cause was lost and their thinking outdated.

It was left for others to draw the deepest implications of this paradigm shift. From Leo’s conviction about the freedom of the Church flowed a conviction about the freedom of the believer. The Sorbonne-educated Parisian intellectual Jacques Maritain, the most influential lay Catholic thinker of the 20th century, worked through this logic in Man and the State (1951). He also drafted Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948: “everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”, including freedom to change your religion and freedom to practise it “in community with others”.

Most important of all is the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae (1965). This is the moment when the Church really demonstrated what it had learnt from its own experiences of, in the declaration’s own words, “force [being] brought to bear in any way in order to destroy or repress religion . . . in a particular country or in a definite community”. Religious liberty is no political expedient — the Church has learnt that religious freedom must be rooted in the dignity of the human being. People are truth-seekers — therein lies their dignity — and the only authentic way of seeking truth is in the context of free inquiry.

But religious freedom must also have real content to it; it can’t be too abstract. The declaration thus fleshes out what the right to the free exercise of religion must entail: on the one hand, immunity from being coerced into belief; on the other, immunity from being restrained from practising faith.

Next, the Church has had to learn that religious freedom will always be threatened if it is construed too narrowly. It must mean more than the right to pray silently to the God of your choosing in the privacy of your own room. It has to include what Combes despised: ministering in public, being allowed to be outward-facing, and to share freely what you believe to be true about the world.

Finally, the declaration shows the Church to have at last learnt the deepest lesson of all: “The right of all citizens and religious communities to religious freedom must be recognised and respected.” The prophet Lamennais has finally been vindicated: religious liberty must be a reciprocal right.

Since the Second Vatican Council, and not just in the context of the fall of Communism, the role of the Catholic Church in pressing for religious freedom is difficult to dispute. The international ministry of Pope St John Paul II is a case in point, advocacy coming straight out of the experience of deprivation.

Returning to the US in 2014, this historical perspective, the lessons Catholics learnt from losing, suggests two things. First, though it is crucial to guard against alarmism — it’s not as if American evangelicals are being subjected to the fate of their spiritual siblings in Iraq — it does feel as if laïcité has arrived in the US 100 years after it did in continental Europe. Religious discrimination, as Kent puts it in King Lear, follows “an old course in a country new”. To make the comparison will prove an intelligent, sensitive way for people of faith to respond to being culturally marginalised. It is particularly important to observe, as we have seen, how aggressive secularism has it in for the public presence of the Church.

Second, if the experience of losing taught believers about the reciprocity of religious liberty rights, perhaps this is a truth they now need to press home to their opponents. The Church learnt, to cite Sturzo again, that “if the Church demands [liberties] for herself, she supposes such liberties are general for all”. Maybe now she needs to turn this around and ask universities, courts and governments whether, if liberties are general for all, they should be for the Church too. Maybe the US interdenominational Christian student movement InterVarsity should swallow its pride, overcome its anger and — with a gentle heart — say to the the Alliance of Happy Atheists at the Californian state universities, “We recognise your table at the freshers’ fair. Will you recognise ours too?”

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Once filled with the Holy Spirit, the apostles are able to speak in their own several languages to all the “devout men, out of every nation under heaven” who were then collected together in Jerusalem. The  responses of these pious strangers to the apostles were divided.  All were amazed; but some sceptics responded with mockery, and saw a carnal cause at work in this spiritual event: “These men are full of new wine,” they said.

When Erasmus wrote his Paraphrases on the New Testament (1517-23), his imagination took fire at this episode. Peter begins the impromptu sermon he gives in response to the imputation of drunkenness with a blunt denial: “These are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.” But Erasmus considered the allegation of drunkenness more carefully, and found a partial truth hidden within it — albeit a truth unsuspected by the scoffers. 

He began by allowing that “great dronkenes is not muche vnlike to fury, for it chaunceth peraduenture, that some in a fury shall speake diuerse wordes of sondry languages which they neuer learned.” (I am quoting from the contemporary translation thought to be by diverse hands, including Catherine Parr.) But then he focused on an important difference between the events at Pentecost and the common experience of listening to drunks: “But no fury wil this vndertake, that all men shal vnderstand that that thou doest speake.” 

However, those who mocked the apostles were nevertheless not entirely wide of the mark. As Erasmus noted, “a man maye sometime tell the truth although he spake in a skoffyng wise.” When the apostles spoke in tongues, this was a kind of drunkenness, although one very different from the intoxication of which they were accused. 

Here Erasmus made a crucial link with another part of the New Testament. In Luke, chapter five, when Jesus is asked why he and his disciples do not abide by the law and fast, he replies in the form of a parable:

No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old: if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved.

This was the text which sprang up in Erasmus’s memory as he pondered the narration of the events at Pentecost in Acts 5:
 

For a suerty full wer they of ye new wine, which ye lorde would not haue in any wyse put into olde bottels. For the olde wine of Moyses lawe had lost his strength and vertue, when Christe was firste insured by mariage to his churche, and the colde & unsauery sence of the lawe was turned by Christe into newe wyne.

However, it was Erasmus the humanist who was inspired to make this connection between Luke’s gospel and the Acts of the Apostles — a connection which Peter, when faced by the scoffers, did not have the presence of mind to make. In deploying this notion of drunkenness as a kind of divine ecstasy, Erasmus was thinking back to his reading in classical literature, no matter that he tried to disguise the debt by a reference to the Old Testament:

Very largely dyd they drynke of that celestiall cup, whereof Dauid the wryter of psalmes speaketh: howe excellent is my cup whiche maketh thee drounke.

Erasmus then goes on to show how “vulgare and common drounkennesse” produces parallel, though diminished, effects to those produced by the heavenly drunkenness of the Apostles.  When he ran that argument, Erasmus may be said to have been both more Christian and more heathen than the Apostles.

At the end of the 16th century Montaigne composed his Essais, which were first published in 1580. The second essay of the second book is entitled “De l’Yvrongnerie”, or “On Drunkenness”. Montaigne, unlike Erasmus, is unwilling to admit that there is a divine potential in drunkenness. He insists that drinking is “un vice grossier et brutal”. Montaigne says that in general his beliefs are enslaved to “l’authorité des opinions anciennes”, yet in this case he cannot follow them: drinking is nothing more than “un vice lache et stupide”. Some vices have affinities with higher things — with learning, with diligence, with courage and prudence. But drinking “est tout corporel et terrestre” — completely carnal and earthy.

He then gives a catalogue of the blunders and crimes into which men have fallen as a result of drunkenness: ambassadors who have given away secrets after being plied with drink, and women who have allowed themselves to be raped without knowing either what was happening or who was doing it.

He tells a story of a woman of good repute who lived nearby in Castres (apparently it was Mme d’Aimar, the wife of the Président of the Parlement of Bordeaux, and a cousin of Montaigne’s):

becoming aware of the first hints that she might be pregnant, [she] told the women of the neighbourhood that if only she had a husband she would think she was expecting.  But as the reason for her suspicions grew bigger every day and finally became evident, she was reduced to having a declaration made from the pulpit in her parish church, stating that if any man would admit what he had done she promised to forgive him and, if he so wished to marry him. One of her young farm-labourers took courage at this proclamation and stated that he had found her one feast-day by her fireside after she had drunk her wine freely; she was so deeply and provocatively asleep that he had been able to have her without waking her up. They married each other and are still alive.

Whether or not one quite credits this anecdote, it shows very clearly how Montaigne’s view of drinking is resolutely modern, materialistic, and opposed to that ecstatic view of drinking which was common in antiquity, and obliquely revived by Erasmus in his Paraphrases.

Not greatly separated in time (Erasmus died when Montaigne was three), nevertheless Erasmus and Montaigne speak to us from different sides of an interpretative line, drawn during the Renaissance, concerning wine and its effects.
 

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