Louvain Studies 40 (2017): 286-302 doi: 10.2143/LS.40.3.3245493 © 2017 by Louvain Studies, all rights reserved Some Islamic Reflections on D’Costa’s Vatican II: Catholic Doctrines on Jews and Muslims Tim Winter Abstract. — This article presents a critical review of D’Costa’s work from a Muslim perspective. Beginning with the ‘continuity or rupture’ controversy, it suggests that Vatican II’s pronouncements and general ethos of engagement with Muslims are in fact in substantive discontinuity with earlier encyclical positions, and have been seen favourably by Muslims concerned to bring Catholics into better harmony with Qur’anic perspectives. D’Costa has rightly signalled the influence of Louis Massignon on the drafters of the relevant conciliar documents, and the article concludes by taking D’Costa’s reflections further, with a theological meditation on Massignon’s Christian acceptance of the Prophet of Islam, and his rehabilitation of the concept of the ‘Semitic’, as part of a larger sea-change in Christian attitudes, in both theology and liturgy, which might presage a fuller and more authentic understanding of Islamic revelation. One might question the right of a non-Christian to take sides in the ongoing arguments over whether Vatican II’s brave enterprise of aggiorna­ mento and ressourcement (curiously, no German word for what took place springs to mind) polluted the deposit of faith with doctrinal innovations. For Muslims, a due regard for Catholics as members of a ‘protected’ religion, with whom one might safely share meat and even, under some circumstances, intermarry, takes little cognizance of such matters, prefer- ring a rather loosely-defined criterion of self-identification with Biblical authority (the implicitly honorific title of People of the Book, to be distinguished sharply from heathens). On the further margins of Chris- tianity jurists might puzzle over the inclusion of, say, Mormons, but a victory for Tridentine traditionalism, or for liberal explorers of the most hazy conciliar novelties, would not affect the Muslim judgment that self- identified Catholics are fully and legitimately Christian. And yet so much in D’Costa’s book is of immediate and suggestive interest to a Muslim reader. The first chapter, which he fears some will find ‘tedious’, is in fact a finely-grained exposition, largely free of the SomE Islamic REflEctioNs oN D’Costa’s VAticAN II 287 more abstruse jargon, of the difficulty of accurately classing the various hermeneutical responses to the conciliar texts, an investigation which often recalls parallel discussions in Islamic hermeneutics about the muhkam and the mutashabih, the ‘clear’ and the ‘ambiguous’ utterances which need to be distinguished in authoritative texts and even in revelation itself. One would have wished for some echo of the insistence found among Muslim exegetes as they contemplate the sheer difficulty of equivocal locutions, who conclude that God Himself wishes there to be ikhtilaf, difference, among His interpreters.1 Is that a normative desire of the Catholic magisterium? Certainly, Muslims who engage with Cath- olics note that the polysemy of authoritative texts can support a refined culture of the defence of divergent views, which is only threatened when a zealous fringe (usually sedevacantist, fiercely liberal or crypto-Protestant) insists that one reading alone is right and therefore tolerable. Like most Muslims, Catholics tend to inhabit a community of “precedent and con- gregation” (sunna wa-jama‘a), the latter being a family of reasonable dissent, assured by the complexity of the former and the stimuli of the times. One of the legacies of Vatican II seems to have been the broadening of Catholic discussions, enabled often by the circumlocutions of the documents, and, as D’Costa shows, by the difficulty experienced by even the most forensic redaction critics in definitively establishing the docu- ments’ history, intent, and theological context. That is, the first Council declared to be pastoral in character, while alienating liberal and reactionary edges of the Church, evidently enriched Catholicism’s internal conversa- tion, as well as providing a broadened space in which the Curia, the laity, and the professional theologians could converse. Vatican II was not primarily or initially convened to deal with the religious Other, and the most doughty controversies which it ignited or intensified appeared in areas removed fairly far from D’Costa’s concerns. Of these, the questions of religious liberty and liturgical reform seem to have loomed the largest in the exegetical battles, and it was here that the ‘continuity or rupture’ debate has been especially productive of polemic and intricate explication. It was these areas which Congar had in mind when he imprudently wrote that the Church had experienced its “Octo- ber Revolution,”2 while Ratzinger himself famously called Gaudium et Spes “a kind of counter-Syllabus.”3 It is here that the “rupture” diagnosis 1. Muhammad Khalid Masud, Shatibi’s Philosophy of Islamic Law (Revised version, Islamabad: Islamic Research Institute, 1995), 245. 2. Yves Congar, Le Concile au jour le jour: deuxième session (Paris: Cerf, 1964), 115. 3. Massimo Faggioli, Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2012), 74. 288 tim WiNtEr seems to be most compelling. Eamon Duffy concludes that the post- conciliar church must evolve a capacity to admit error: “Roman theology has simply not yet found a way of acknowledging that the institutional Church itself could err and sin […],” disputing the notion “that the Church’s doctrinal magisterium had been ‘silent’ on the question of reli- gious liberty until 1965.”4 The case here seemed clear-cut: Mirari Vos (1832) had inveighed against liberty of conscience, as had the Syllabus of Errors, but the conciliar bishops, most of whom had taken the Oath against Modernism, passed Dignitatis Humanae by a huge majority. D’Costa strives manfully with this volte face, and offers a nuanced critique of, notably, John O’Malley’s conclusion that Dignitatis Humanae entails a “silent rejection” of earlier positions (the theme of silence again, so frequently invoked by interpreters of this council).5 Readers of a willing mind may buy his conclusion that for the magisterium, the new teachings on religious freedom were not a paradigm shift but another learned and misunderstood ressourcement of a tradition which, however productive of allocutions, bulls and encyclicals, contrived to remain ‘silent’ on the ques- tion which Dignitatis Humanae tackled so directly.6 Dogma, when offi- cially promulgated through the Church’s teaching authority, needs metic- ulous and responsible mapping. D’Costa suggests an almost biological image of doctrines as living beings, which may hibernate for centuries, be revived, and even breed; they may grow and bloom luxuriantly (as with the 19th and 20th century Marian declarations); they may add to the rich mix of the deposit of faith, but – and here the analogy breaks down – they may not change or disappear.7 Like souls, once they are originated they are immortal, whatever their earthly travails. Looking at Catholic doctrines about doctrine, then, credo ut intel- ligam tends to be the operative principle. Conservative or liberalising, optimistic or pessimistic dispositions in the hearts of theologians find in the conciliar documents a set of mirrors to their own predilections; the pre-existing cognitive frame inevitably dictates exegesis. D’Costa coher- ently defends the continuist position, but it should be said that the diagnosis of rupture remains formidable, particularly when not driven by nostalgia (the besetting weakness of Lefebvre, with his adversions to la vieille France). Curiously, the work seen by many as the most meticulous 4. Eamon Duffy, Faith of Our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Tradition (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 166. 5. Gavin D’Costa, Vatican II: Catholic Doctrines on Jews and Muslims (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 25n. 6. Ibid., 47. 7. Ibid., 9, 16. SomE Islamic REflEctioNs oN D’Costa’s VAticAN II 289 and objective refutation of the Council as a treasonable innovation, by the former peritus Romano Amerio, does not appear in D’Costa’s other- wise impressively broad bibliography.8 Amerio’s task, like D’Costa’s, is to investigate the documents jurisprudentially rather than as a set of poetic and pastoral meditations. On the question of religious liberty, particu- larly, he presents an almost impeccable case. D’Costa adopts the same method of close reading when glossing the conciliar documents which touch upon Islam. From his concordist stand- point he must decline the assessment of a key peritus, the great Egyptian Dominican Georges Anawati, who saw the new articulations on Islam as a “radical novelty.”9 The approach is instead to show that medieval and later ecclesial language about Islam, however bristling with anathemas, does not need to be taken as part of the indispensable deposit of faith, and that Nostra Aetate, in particular, may be seen as speaking where ear- lier the magisterium was technically silent. There was never a definitive Catholic declaration on Islam, its Prophet or its God; for the premodern church the formal doctrine was in potentia, being yet uncreated. Little would be served by closely parsing D’Costa’s forensic assessments and exegetic choices in demonstrating the existence of this silence; again, this may be an internal matter of Catholic authenticity best left to Catholics themselves. Amerio, for one, does not believe in it. Still, whatever the technical assessment, the ship’s change of course was undeniable. One notes with interest and relief how a very small number of Islam experts, together with their allies (Rahner, Chenu, Daniélou, Montini himself, and other admirers of Massignon),10 contrived to take the assembled Fathers, most of whom at the outset would have preferred a traditionalist denunciation of Islam,11 together with a hardly less conservative Curia largely appointed under Pius XII, and to secure the passage of a text which now required Catholics to “look with favour” on Islam.