Thank God for a wise, truth-telling Pope
Ilike the new Pope, Benedict XVI. I have not yet met him, but hope to do so soon. It is always fun to judge leaders from afar. David Cameron, another fellow I’ve not yet met, though he is a neighbour, looks fine when I see him striding around Notting Hill. And he went to a good school. But whenever he opens his mouth he says something silly. By contrast, whenever Pope Benedict opens his mouth he says something wise.
I have known seven popes a bit and covered the conclaves which elected five of them. Pius XII was vain, too pro-German for my taste, and talked a lot, though he never listened. John XXIII was a good egg who relished a joke. When he was nuncio in Paris he told me, ‘When I attend a big dinner, and one of the women guests is too décolletée, which sometimes happens in this wicked city, you’d think the male guests would look at the woman. ‘Mais non, ils regardent le Nonce.’ He said, ‘My weakness is spending too much time in the kitchens, gossiping.’ Paul VI was a Hamlet-figure without the glamour of poetry. He hated splendour and deprived the cardinals of their wonderful red hats. But he kept his own tiara. There was a brief sad pope whom I didn’t meet. Then the great John Paul II, surely a saint. He radiated spiritual power and glory. You really thought, ‘This is the vicar of Christ.’ He loved every aspect of spiritual life and all important aspects of political life on earth. So he was an important historical figure and the leader of the trinity who destroyed the Soviet Empire and world communism (the other two were Thatcher and Reagan). But John Paul was not much interested in aesthetics and all that side of God’s wonders.
By contrast, Benedict is a cultural figure of considerable importance. He is a fine musician. His elder brother was Kappelmeister at Regensburg Cathedral, the parish church of the Habsburg family. This is one of the most important musical jobs in the Germanspeaking world. While not quite up to professional standard perhaps, Benedict himself is a fine pianist whose custom it is to play a sonata by Schubert, Schumann or Brahms (or Haydn for that matter) every day, to relax himself after work, being an exceptionally hard and intensive worker. He loves all the arts and is knowledgeable about them. Since he became Pope he has transformed the private apartments in the Vatican. He went down into the vast papal cellars, which stretch for miles under St Peter’s and the palace. They are an Aladdin’s cave of treasures, gifts to the Holy Father from people all over the world for centuries. Some are still in their packing-cases: precious porcelain and silver, tapestries, pictures, illuminated books encrusted with precious stones, carpets, furniture, statues, lace and fabrics, tiles and oriental rugs, ornaments of every conceivable kind. The Pope has made a small but judicious selection of this treasure and had it carted upstairs where it now adorns the rooms where he receives special visitors. They have to be very special too, for unlike John Paul, who loved to see and converse with people, Benedict is a hands-on pontiffsovereign who likes to rule his enormous Church with close attention to detail, reading all the key papers carefully and writing detailed instructions to his cardinals and bishops. He has no time for chat.
Like John Paul, Benedict is a philosopher, but whereas his predecessor was a phenomenologist in the (to me) cloudy and labyrinthine school of Husserl, Heidegger and other central European world-crashers, the new Pope is closer to the mainstream European tradition of Augustine, Aquinas and Kant. He might be defined as a strictly spiritual rationalist. He believes, as I do, that true religion is the exploration of metaphysics by the power of reason. His thinking is elaborate, refined, confident and energetic yet also questioning, humble and, where appropriate, tentative. He makes the Oxford chemistry professor who recently attacked religion as ‘the crack-alley of the intellect’ seem like a savage. He sees faith and reason going together, hand in hand, one supporting and illuminating the other, each indispensable. This is the approach of Aquinas and, for that matter, Duns Scotus. It is also akin to the best Judaeic thinking, in for instance Maimonides. But Islam is different, owing to its closing down of intellectual examination after the age of Averoes and Avicenna. Hence the passage in Benedict’s brilliant lecture delivered last year at Regensburg University. Of course the Muslim fundamentalists who came out on to the streets foaming at the mouth, shouting and screaming abuse, and who in Africa murdered a harmless and innocent nun, did not read the lecture or have the faintest idea what it was all about. Nor did Western journalist critics who joined in the abuse in such pseudo-intellectual exhibits as the Guardian (nobody on this paper seems to read anything except other newspapers). In fact the lecture is a cool, calm, well-documented and penetrating presentation of the case for reason occupying the centre of religious life, which argues that its absence, as in Islam, is a false weakness. No educated and sensible person who reads it could possibly complain that it is polemical, bigoted or emotionally hostile to Islam. Indeed the murder of the poor nun exactly proves the Pope’s point about what is wrong with Islam.
Pope Benedict was also right to mark the 50th anniversary of ‘Europe’ by pointing out that this bureaucratic concept, with its repudiation of the Continent’s Christian and cultural origins, is shallow and materialistic, doomed to oblivion, a point undermined by the terrifyingly low birth rates of its peoples. Had he been a less circumspect and charitable man, he might have added, as I now do, that Brussels–Europe combines all the worst characteristics of its components: French arrogance, Italian corruption, German tunnel-vision, Spanish bloodymindedness, Dutch obstinacy, Belgian cowardice, Austrian anti-Semitism, Portuguese evasiveness and Danish cop-outing, not to speak of the new Slav contributions, Polish irrealism, Czech confusion, Slovak evasion, all topped up by Hungarian deviousness. ‘Europe’ is the worst thing to happen to Europe since the two world wars it started, and the dire consequences are only just beginning to manifest themselves. What will it be like by mid-century? Is this pathetic continent heading for a species of historical hell?
As it happens, the Pope followed up his ‘Europe heading for oblivion’ remarks by reminding us all that hell is not a figure of speech but an actual state, though he did not elaborate on what precisely it means, how we go there or why God created it. It is good to have on the throne of St Peter a man prepared to tell unwelcome truths and to insist that it is not material knowledge but the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom.
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