I read this article on the straitstimes, 1 Oct 2006, sunday, by Janadas Devan. Its so good I am reproducing it here in full, for educational purposes.
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JOHN Duns Scotus, Byzantium, jihad - Pope Benedict XVI mentioned all three in his controversial address to the University of Regensburg on Sept 12. His Holiness didn't say so, but those proper nouns also gave us 'dunce' (an idiot, a dullard), 'byzantine' ('extremely complicated, inflexible, underhand', especially in politics, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines the adjective) and 'Holy War'.
How did that happen, and why? What do these transformations, or transmogrifications, tell us about religion - or rather, about some aspects of it?
Let's begin with Duns Scotus. Born in Scotland in the town of Duns, he became one of the 13th century's most eminent theologians. Doctor Subtilis (the Subtle Doctor) was the title popular opinion conferred on him, for his philosophy was thought to be especially intricate and subtle, just as Thomas Aquinas, the other great 13th century theologian, was known as Doctor Angelicus (the Angelic Doctor).
Pope Benedict criticised Duns Scotus for his voluntarism - the theory that God should be conceived as Will, not Logos or reason. In contrast to Thomas Aquinas, Pope Benedict noted, Duns Scotus believed that one 'can only know God's voluntas ordinata', or His ordained or established will.
God said, let the bird fall off the tree, and the bird duly fell off the tree; no use asking why, we can only know it was God's will. Such notions gave rise 'to the image of a capricious God, who is not bound to truth and goodness', Pope Benedict noted. Rejecting this view of God, His Holiness stressed: 'God acts with logos.'
Duns Scotus, though, didn't become a derogatory eponym - a name that becomes an everyday word - because of his voluntarism. Indeed, his influence lasted for centuries, and his followers, known as 'Scotists' or 'Dunsmen', dominated English universities up to the late 16th century.
The Dunsmen became known as the 'Duns', a byword for 'pedants', and later 'Dunce', a byword for 'dullards', because of the intemperate manner in which they had opposed the humanism of the Renaissance. No need to ask why the bird fell, they said. All one need know is that there is a first cause - God's will. An undue interest in second causes - the province of science - will only serve to diminish one's faith in the first.
It is altogether apt that our word 'dunce' commemorates the religious obscurantism that almost throttled modern science at its birth in the Renaissance. Sub specie eternitatis, or in the light of eternity, faith and reason may not be opposed, as Pope Benedict argued. But sub specie history, let's not forget, faith did indeed try to stifle reason for centuries. That the first 'dunces' were religious men registers that important truth.
Now, for our second word, 'byzantine', the adjective: It derives, of course, from Byzantium, the ancient Greek city on the Bosporus that Constantine the Great rebuilt as Constantinople in 330, and that is now known as Istanbul. It became the capital of the eastern empire when the Roman empire was split in two in 395. The Byzantine empire lasted for 1,123 years, till May 29, 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II.
John Julius Norwich, in his magisterial history of Byzantium, blames the 18th century historian Edward Gibbon for the bad press the Eastern empire has received. 'Like all classically educated Englishmen of his day,' Norwich writes, Gibbon 'saw Byzantium as the betrayal of all that was best in ancient Greece and Rome.'
Its art seemed sumptuous and intricate, lacking the balance and proportion of classical Western art; its Eastern Orthodox religious practices seemed familiar and yet bizarrely foreign; its politics were devious and complex. In a word, Byzantium seemed byzantine to the West, primarily because it was eastern.
Interestingly, Pope Benedict quoted one of the last Byzantine emperors, Manuel II Paleologus, on the subject of Islam. 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new,' Pope Benedict reported him asking a learned Persian in 1391.
'God is not pleased by blood,' Manuel II told the Persian, 'and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature.' Such a statement was self-evident to Manuel, Pope Benedict argued, because he was 'shaped by Greek philosophy'.
Manuel II, by this account, seems altogether rational and non-violent - a Byzantine Mahatma Gandhi almost - compared to the marauding Ottoman Turks who were pressing in on Constantinople.
Actually, he was nothing of that sort. 'He shared a love of literature and the traditional Byzantine passion for theology,' notes Norwich, but he was 'a man of action' - and devious and underhand, a byzantine man of action, one might add.
He fought with his father and brothers, his fellow emperors in the constellation of small states that made up the shrivelled Byzantine empire of his time. He travelled to Venice, Rome, Paris and London, trying to drum up support for another 'full-blown international Crusade' against the infidels. He made common cause with the infidels, taking part in their campaigns to expand their sultanate, even at the expense of the last remaining Byzantine strongholds in Asia Minor. Manuel II resembles nothing so much as a contemporary Lebanese Christian politician, navigating the byzantine politics of that war-ravaged, multi-religious country.
It is not in the least surprising that such a man, trapped in the politics of his time, would have said: 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'
Manuel tried to do the same himself, inviting the Western Christians to join him in another Crusade against the infidels. 'Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye,' asked the gentle Galilean in his Sermon on the Mount. Christ's words, needless to say, apply as much to Christians as they do to Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. And of course, all - Christians as well Muslims, Hindus as well as Buddhists - are united in believing that while casting out the motes in the others' eyes is a matter of the utmost urgency, casting out the beams in their own is an irrelevance for they are but mere figments of the others' crazed delusions.
Finally, jihad and jihadist, which are often translated loosely as 'holy war' and 'warrior', respectively. As countless Islamic scholars have pointed out, these translations misrepresent grossly what the words mean.
Jihad derives from the Arabic root ghd, meaning 'to strive', 'to make an utmost effort' or 'to struggle'. The struggle in question covers everything from striving to attain perfect faith to promoting justice. To equate jihad with terrorism is sacrilegious.
'While Al-Qaeda may call themselves 'jihadists' to legitimise their atrocities, I do not see why you need to trumpet their misrepresentations,' a Muslim Singaporean wrote to me recently, objecting to my use of the word in an article. My correspondent was right.
James Fallows in a recent Atlantic Monthly article listed 'an alternative lexicon', assembled with the advice of Islamic scholars, that he hoped would deny terrorists the legitimacy of sanctified language. 'These include hirabah ('unholy war') instead of jihad; irabists ('terrorists') instead of jihadists; mufsidoon ('evildoers') instead of mujahideen; and so on.'
That is sensible advice, but it is doubtful if the meanings of religious words can be cleaned up so easily. Consider, for instance, how the following simple words have come down to us: 'giddy', 'enthusiasm' and 'fanatic'.
Giddy is from the Old English gydig, meaning 'possessed by God'. Enthusiasm comes from the Greek en, in + theos, God, meaning 'inspired by God' or 'God in us'. And fanatic comes from the Latin fanaticus, 'of or relating to a temple', deriving as it does from the noun fanum, temple.
How did giddy come to mean 'overexcited, mentally intoxicated, excitable, frivolous'; enthusiasm, mere 'strong interest or great eagerness'; and fanatic, 'frenzied, mad' - and now simply 'fan', as in 'football fan', which derives too from the same fanaticus?
Religious words slip, slide, perish, lose their meaning, get distorted, become corrupt, precisely because the religious, like the irreligious, slip and slide, distort their faith, give way to irrationality, become corrupt. Corruptio optimi pessima.
Corruption of the best is the worst.
