That Mr Johnson, supposedly a serious politician and commentator, speaks in these terms, is deeply depressing. Equally depressing is the standard political mantra (of which Mr Johnson, to his credit, is not guilty) to the effect that whatever motivates terrorism “it has nothing to do with Islam.” Then what has it got to do with? How on earth are we meant to defeat ISIS if we seem so unable or unwilling to understand its roots?
As this paper has said in a recent editorial, we need to talk about Islam. We need to have a conversation, among ourselves, and with Muslims, and, most importantly, Muslims need to converse amongst themselves, about the nature of religious belief and how certain religious beliefs can lead people to take up terrorism. Put starkly, we need to discuss why certain Muslims are terrorists today, in stark contrast to other religious groups, who have no track record of violence.
The conversation needs to tackle certain technical questions, of the sort that many people dismiss as irrelevant. But it’s urgent that we acquire a philosophical cast of mind. Here are four questions we need to ask.
The first is: what is the relation of a religious text to its context?
Second: are ethics particular or universal?
Third: is the nature of God utterly transcendent?
Fourth: does the saeculum have any value?
These questions are abstract, but when reduced to practicalities, their value should be apparent.
The Koran, as all serious scholars over the last few decades seem to acknowledge, is a product of its time, rooted in history. The same is true for the Bible, and this is not a problem for Christians, who have no difficulty in seeing God working through history. But its undeniable that the extremist tendency in Islam denies the historical nature of revelation, and in so doing it denies the universal nature of ethics and the value of the secular. The Koran, claiming to be ahistorical, yet rooted in one time and one place, paradoxically exalts that one time and place at the expense of all others. Thus, that which is foreign to the world of the Koran becomes “other” and eventually becomes demonised. The search for the perfect Caliphate (which has never existed and never will) also becomes the obsessive hatred of all that is unlike the imagined Caliphate. Bin Laden’s Afghanistan (or Iran, or wherever) becomes the opposite pole to the Great Satan, America.
But the truth is that there is good everywhere, even in America, because God created the world, which is, for all who can reason, a book to be read, just as the Bible is a book to be read. God is, of course, transcendent, but He is also immanent. The presence of God, and the understanding of God, does not entail the annihilation of the human or the material. He commands us to destroy nothing he has made.
I have never been a Thomist (to the distress of many) and always been an Augustinian, but here we must follow both Augustine and Aquinas. Augustine shifted from Manichaeism, from seeing evil in opposition to good, the two radically separate and at war, to Catholicism, which sees evil not as a substance but as a privation of good. And Aquinas tells us that gratia supponit naturam, non destruit, sed perficit eam. Grace presupposes nature, does not destroy it but brings it to perfection. The extremists of ISIS believe grace can only flourish where nature has been destroyed. They also see evil as substantial, because they deny that nature in itself is good. The conversation that we need to have with them is the same conversation St Augustine has with the Manichees of his day, sixteen centuries ago, and St Thomas had with his opponents eight hundred years ago. Nothing changes.
The conversation needs to be along these lines. Mr Johnson may appreciate the Latin tag. It certainly is more useful than name-calling.
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