Some Islamic Reflections on D'costa's Vatican II: Catholic

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, preferring 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 documents’ 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 religious 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 question which Dignitatis Humanae tackled so directly.6 Dogma, when offi- cially promulgated through the Church’s teaching authority, needs meticulous 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, particularly, 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 earlier 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. Where once there was silence, now there rang out a whole set of magisterial pronouncements; but not only were the texts very volumi- nous12 in comparison with the output of earlier councils, they contained

8. Romano Amerio (tr. Fr. John Parsons), Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth century (Kansas City, MO: Sarto House, 1996). Amerio chose to remain within the “new Church” rather than join the Lefebvrists. 9. D’Costa, Vatican II, 161. 10. Another of his readers was Blondel, a further, more remote influence on some of the framers of the Council; see his Qu’est-ce que la mystique? (Paris: Bloud and Gay, 1929), 59-60. 11. Christian S. Krokus, “Louis Massignon’s Influence on the Teaching of Vatican II on Muslims and Islam,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 23 (2012): 329-345, p. 330. 12. not to say orotund, as in the well-known case of Inter Mirifica. 290 tim winter a series of ambiguities which shaped their reception and in some respects exacerbated the divisions they hoped to reduce. Some were truly delphic, thanks to repeated episodes of debate, compromise and redaction, and it may be that some drafters were playing a long game. Cardinal Heenan famously observed that “a determined group could wear down opposition and produce a formula patent of both an orthodox and a modernistic interpretation.”13 According to this perspective it was usually reformists who cunningly inserted ambiguities which could later serve as the starting- point for further developments,14 and Rahner went on record as describ- ing the Council as “the beginning of the beginning.”15 Such conciliar “machinations,”16 admirably described by O’Malley, leading to decisions by a majority which in the nature of the process could either be swayed by or outvote the relatively small number of bishops with active pastoral and academic expertise on a given topic, have been consistently lamented by those conservatives who cry up a trahison des clercs, finding an infidelity to tradition in even the most cautious and reactionary readings of the documents. And again, one can readily find parallel embarrassments and exegetic stunts in the standard Islamic hermeneutic literature, most noto- riously in the awkward case of a consensus (ijma’) in the premodern Shari’a, supposedly inerrant, which evidently needs to change (the case of slavery being only one instance17). While the Catholic reception of these often equivocal texts fluctu- ated, Muslim reactions to the thawing of the Church’s view of Islam were predictably positive. Three main responses might be identified. Speaking for many in the post-colonial Arab world, Ismail Faruqi, while objecting to Vatican II’s “condescending and paternalising” language and its assumption that Islam is, whatever Muslims might think, simply a praepa ratio, grudgingly recognised it as “an advance over the former position where the Muslim was regarded as sub-human.”18 Mahmut Aydın voiced the widely-felt regret that the conciliar documents spoke about Muslims

13. Cardinal (John) Heenan, “The Authority of the Church,” The Tablet, 18 May 1968, 5. 14. Amerio, Iota Unum, 611; this has been a frequent theme in Lefebvre’s descrip- tions of the ‘liberal takeover’. cf. Marcel Lefebvre, Open Letter to Confused Catholics (Leominster: Fowler Wright Books, 1986), 107-111. 15. Karl Rahner, “The Council: A New Beginning,” in his The Church after the Council, trans. Davis C. Herron and Rodelinde Albrecht (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), 20. See Faggioli, Vatican II, 38. 16. D’Costa, Vatican II, 136. 17. For example, Ahmed Chefik, L’Esclavage au point de vue musulman (2nd edition, Cairo: Imprimerie Misr, 1938). 18. Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, Islam and Other Faiths (Leicester: Islamic Foundation, 1998), 151, 270. Some Islamic Reflections on D’Costa’s Vatican II 291 rather than about Islam and its Prophet, where the church apparently continues its silence.19 Finally, Karim Lahham, in a discussion of the philosophical shifts which underlay the council’s spirit, has reflected on the “inability to reconstitute a traditional alternative” to a scholasticism seemingly discredited at the Council in favour of forms of philosophical personalism, adding that “if effective juridical authority is predicated on theological coherence, the Church has a difficult road to travel to achieve the cohesion and authority it enjoyed pre-Vatican II.” However he did note that that same personalist discourse opened up “increased compas- sion to the non-Christian world.”20 Again, the judgement is broadly and predictably positive. None of these Muslim commentators reflected on the salient role played by the thinking of Louis Massignon. D’Costa, while suggesting that his impact on Vatican II has been exaggerated,21 rightly deals with this at some length, offering a necessarily abbreviated but careful account of the nature and extent of the maverick French Orientalist’s shaping of the conciliar documents. This would have been enhanced by a reading of the biography by Pierre Rocalve, which provides perhaps the best summary of Massignon’s theology of Islam; but overall the picture he gives is a valid and important one. We learn how the abandoned first draft of the celebrated passage in Lumen Gentium which deals with Islam’s Abrahamic filiation had included an unmistakeably Massignonian reference to Islam’s Ishmaelite heritage and to its genuine connection to Abrahamic revelation.22 Ishmael disappeared from the approved version,23 in which an enigmatic formula remarked that Muslims “profess to hold the faith of Abraham,” a far weaker and in fact almost unhelpful form of words, as many have noted. The text seemed revolutionary at the time, as Anawati said, but the bulk of Massignon’s theology of a validly Abrahamic Islam failed to make it into the document. Massignon’s distinctive reflections on Muslim religion are well rehearsed by D’Costa, although perhaps we could have learned more

19. Mahmut Aydın, Modern Western Christian Theological Understandings of Mus- lims since the Second Vatican Council (Washington, D.C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2002), 44. 20. Karim Lahham, The Roman Catholic Church’s Position on Islam after Vatican II (Abu Dhabi: Tabah Foundation, 2008), 27-28. 21. D’Costa proposes Asín Palacios as another possible influence; but given Asín’s generalised dislike of Islam this surely remains unproven. 22. D’Costa, Vatican II, 172. 23. Ibid., 166, 172, notes that one factor was the apparent ahistoricity of Islam’s Abraham; one might add that secular historiography, while generally confirming this judgement, has hardly more use for the Genesis accounts. 292 tim winter about some views that the Council did not or could not incorporate. One was his conviction that not only was Ishmael the heir to a valid share in Abraham’s blessing, but that his seed was destined to bear a providential role in salvation history in proclaiming to the Jews the real- ity of Christ’s messiahhood and the virginal perfection of Mary, thus showing the validity of Muhammad’s prophecy in the Medina period.24 The Qur’an, for Massignon, was incontrovertibly an inspired text,25 although it bore une autorité conditionelle which he never clearly expli- cated.26 These perceptions, while not conceding Islam’s every claim, were of seismic proportions. It would have been unreasonable to expect the conciliar bishops to have swallowed so ambitious a scheme, not only because of the momentous leap from past anathema (however implicit or ‘silent’ in the most authoritative church statements), but also because Massignon never expounded his theology of Islam within a consistent treatment, preferring to leave clues scattered over his many writings. Even in a ‘pastoral’ Council the periti needed a systematic theology of Islam, not a series of flashes of mystical empathy. Moreover Massignon’s proposal of a kind of Muhammadology which presented the Prophet as a reparative post-Christic apostle to Jews who had stubbornly missed the Christ event, who spoke to them in ‘semitic’ terms which they might understand, could also have complicated the Church’s new initiative towards Judaism. Questions remain about Massignon’s attitude to ‘the Jews’.27 Still, D’Costa is right to register the centrality of Massignon in pushing forward the Catholic discourse on Islam in a way that indispen- sably contributed to the Council’s deliberations; it would be hard to imagine Nostra Aetate or Lumen Gentium without his legacy. If Massignon’s ghost was the presiding Islamological genius of the Council, it may be helpful to recall the prevailing mid-twentieth century mood which allowed his theories so considerable an impact on official Catholic teaching. Here one needs to move outside the parameters D’Costa has set himself and consider the Zeitgeist which the Council inhabited, not only because its acceptance or rejection shaped the spec- trum of responses and interpretations of the documents and the rival definitions of the “spirit of Vatican II,” but because Massignon himself, and his many readers and disciples, might be said to represent the sign

24. Pierre Rocalve, Louis Massignon et l’islam (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1993), 41-43, 86. 25. Ibid., 38. 26. Ibid., 146. 27. Cf. Christian Destremau, “La question zioniste, l’État d’Israël,” in Louis Mas- signon et ses contemporains, ed. Jacques Keryell (Paris: Karthala, 1997), 289-308. Some Islamic Reflections on D’Costa’s Vatican II 293 of a new and providential moment in Europe’s stance towards the religion which historically defined its boundaries. Rocalve sees Massignon as not only a sui generis pioneer of an idiosyncratic view of mystical intersubjectivity, but as the child of some characteristic romantic and in fact anti-modern tendencies of his age. Like him, his first mentor Charles de Foucauld had been a philosophical refugee from European positivism who came to be entranced by the desert and by the perceived sancta simplicitas of the Islam which seemed so proper there. As de Foucauld recalled: “I liked Islam very much, with its simplicity, simplicity of dogma, simplicity of hierarchy, simplicity of morality.”28 On the brink of conversion, he recoiled into a rediscovery of the riches of his own French Christian heritage. Massignon seems to have been shaped and energised by the same vertiginous sense of near-conversion; asked by his leading pupil Vincent Monteil (who did convert) why he had never accepted the faith of the Prophet, he replied that it was inachevé, but added that “mon retour à l’Église est le fils de la prière des saints musulmans.”29 His Christianity represented a debt to Islam. Massignon’s yearning to be ‘within’ the Islam whose sanctity he had experienced bore fruit in the curious ‘apotropean’ sodality of the Badaliyya, the ‘substitutionists’, whose members symbolically joined the ‘excluded’ Ishmaelite people to pray and fast and manifest other versions of Islam’s Five Pillars, remaining Christocentric but hoping to experience the spiritual and Abrahamic hospitality which had so transformed and healed Massignon and de Foucauld. The Badaliyya represented, in a sense, a Catholic confraternity of those who were mystically attracted to Muslim- ness, and included several who went on to shape the conciliar processes; according to a persistent report, Montini himself had been an active member, and in the opinion of some it was this which helped him, as Pope, to form his views about Muslims.30 There has been little Muslim reflection on the Badaliyya phenom- enon, or the philo-Islamic yearning which it seems to cater for. Clearly it comprises far more than a ‘substitutionary’ and intercessive witness from within a dark and Christless place, a kind of prolepsis of the Harrowing

28. Cited in Ali Merad, Christian Hermit in an Islamic World: A Muslim’s View of Charles de Foucauld (New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999), 46. 29. Rocalve, Louis Massignon, 12. One notes the Muslim rumour of a secret conversion: the last director of the Mevlevi lodge in Üsküdar allegedly told him: “Inwardly you are a Muslim. Outwardly, if you continue to wear your priest’s cassock you will serve Islam more successfully.” Ahmed Yüksel Özemre, Üsküdar, Ah Üsküdar (3rd edition, Istan- bul: Kubbealtı Neşriyat, 2005), 54. 30. Krokus, “Louis Massignon’s Influence,” 336; cf. Rocalve, Louis Massignon, 25; for more on the Badaliyya see Rocalve, 93-94. 294 tim winter of Hell. Neither should it be seen simply as a missiological tactic, for in becoming “Muslims to the Muslims” (Basetti-Sani) these Catholic men and women were not really hoping to be noticed by potential catechu- mens. Instead they were explorers seeking insemination by the vagrant logos spermatikos, by which, according to a patristic teaching strangely neglected by Nostra Aetate, the fecundating word flows anonymously outside the visible church. The Badaliyya represent an islam inachevé: one might propose the psychological speculation that their members, drawn to Ishmael but unable to accept the deep simplicity of his doctrines, created their own space in which they could nevertheless receive something of his grace, sublimating their own yearning for Islam into a historically and textually dubious discourse of an imagined Islamic, specifically Hallajian, yearning for the Cross. More than an Orientalist fête costumée or a romantic experiment in ‘going native’, the Badaliyya perhaps witness to a longing within a traditional and mystical Catholic soul for a Sufi gnosis, through a kind of celibate and unconsummated love analogous to Massignon’s chaste cohabitation with his beautiful Egyptian disciple and friend Mary Kahil, a steady and intimate relationship, strange to modern judgments, which perhaps parallels his relationship with Islam.31 The idea that ‘Ishmael’, the ‘other Semite’ of historic Christian repudiation, might speak to a Catholic generation essentially conservative and nostalgic, and certainly not liberal in temper, while maintaining an appeal to a ‘semitic’ simplicity, might link Massignon’s apparently idiosyncratic contribution to the Council to wider tendencies in the Zeitgeist. In particular, Islam’s relative optimism about human nature (fitra), which Massignon liked to invoke as one of its Abrahamic ‘signs’,32 seemed congenial to the anti-Augustinian tendencies which came to prevail so strongly as the Council progressed. Whereas earlier councils had dealt with external threats through anathemas and curses, Vatican II, faced with the hardly less formidable challenges of modernity, favoured a language of restrained inclusion, rooted in an essentially positive view of the non-Catholic world and the presence, however damaged, of grace

31. Such a latter-day near-resuscitation of the patristic practice of heroically chaste propinquity has parallels: other thinkers who enjoyed a close relationship with a muse include von Balthasar, Wojtyla, and, perhaps, Daniélou. The creative and mystical energy thus unleashed is said to be due to the tension between sacred and profane. See Anne P. Alwis, Celibate Marriages in Late Antique and Byzantine Hagiography (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), 3. Here we have a reminder of how remote Massignon could be from Muslim norms. 32. Rocalve, Louis Massignon, 31. Some Islamic Reflections on D’Costa’s Vatican II 295 and virtue within it. Michael Barnes suggests that the hermeneutic key to the entire repertory of the conciliar documents is Dei Verbum, which called for a return to scripture as the catalyst for an openness to the world, which is summoned to self-transformation through an inspired response to scripture’s ‘signs’ of God’s self-communication. This shift from scholastic propositionalism to a personalism (adroitly noted by Lahham) meant that the Council replaced a deductive system which imposes its own categories on the other with a contemplative ‘logic of signs’ which seeks to enter into dialogue with the Other.33 This triumph for the work of theologians such as de Lubac and Daniélou made Massignon’s reading of Islam, and particularly his exposition of Sufi epistemology as an alchemical reaction between the human soul and God’s “signs” (ayat) in the Qur’an, sound like an idea whose time had come.34 How Massignon, in most ways a conservative sensible of the charm of ancient pilgrimages and liturgies, intensely Marian in his devotion, and monarchist, could have provided the impetus for the Church’s incorporation of a new valorisation of Islam which was clearly part of a wider process of opening up to the modern world, is thus an important question. As suggested, part of the answer might be sought in the implicit convergence between his admiration for Islam’s ‘Abrahamic’ simplicity and the common preference among the periti for a streamlining of many aspects of the Church’s formal life and for a shift towards a ‘Gospel freedom’ thought by many to have characterised the age of apostolic simplicity. Islam’s lack of an Augustinian pessimism about human sinfulness might also supply a clue. D’Costa notes that for Rahner, the largest of the shifts was the move from salvation pessimism to salvation optimism.35 Again, this drew accusations of naiveté from conservatives: Ame- rio was sure that the dominant flavour of the new system was Pelagian, the Fathers having fallen prey to a bien-pensant confidence in human nature and natural religion which is alien to the Church’s older Augustinian realism. Amerio deploys this as one of his chief objections to Ad Gentes

33. Michael Barnes, “Opening up a Dialogue: Dei Verbum and the Religions,” Modern Theology 29 (2013): 10-31, see p. 31. 34. See Patrick Laude, Louis Massignon: the Vow and the Oath, transl. Edin Q. Lohja (London: The Matheson Trust, 2011), 48: for Massignon “language is not a mere tool of communication, nor a ‘manufacturer’ of culture, nor a symbolic system of exploitation; it is, rather, an articulation of being, a prolongation and a multiplication of the Invoca- tion of Divine Presence.” 35. D’Costa, Vatican II, 107. 296 tim winter and Nostra Aetate, which he holds to be “stamped with a certain natural- ism […] the word ‘supernatural’ does not occur in either of them.”36 Chenu seemed to confirm this when he remarked that although his team had inserted references to sin here and there, “they were rather like added parts.”37 Replying to the Lefebvrist critique, Aidan Nichols also admits to finding it “surprising” that Nostra Aetate hardly refers to “the history of religion as a story of error.”38 The Massignonian perception of Ishmael’s optimism may well have made Islam seem more intelligible to some of the liberally-minded bishops. Their minds had already been fed by several other important tribu- taries. One was the Council’s general repugnance towards any implicitly Marcionite dichotomy between Old and New, Letter and Spirit, or an insistence on the categorically unique necessity of supernatural Christian revelation which, for some, seemed to have coexisted with if not provoked the anti-Semitism of the Nazi era. An Augustinian focus on human nature as radically contaminated by sin needed to be tempered by a ressourcement in the more optimistic readings of Aquinas; the intense involvement of Dominicans at the council, not least in the committees responsible for Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate, was perhaps a reflection of this. Some of the most influential Jesuits, such as Lonergan and Rah- ner, shared this agenda. This might be taken further. The twentieth-century post-scholastic Thomists, with their renewed confidence in the indicativity of nature, had been fully aware of the Islamic, or at least the Arabic, component of the thirteenth-century transformations in Christian thought, which seemed to presage the greater openness to the world and its experiences which the Zeitgeist required. Congar, spending time with ordinary Italians in the cheerful mezzogiorno, remarked: “What I see makes me understand why St. Thomas was so attentive to Arabs and gentiles.”39 This relatively optimistic anthropology drew easily on Aquinas’ interest in Arabic discussions of the capacity of the soul for natural prophecy,40 an idea whose usefulness for a more positive theology of religions was evident. Just as the Dominicans had fought against the Platonic-Augustinian

36. Amerio, Iota Unum, 563-564; he includes Ad Gentes under the same criticism. 37. Marie-Dominique Chenu and Jacques Duquesne, Jacques Duquesne interroge le Père Chenu: Un théologien en liberté (Paris: Centurion 1975), 182. 38. Moyra Doorly and Aidan Nichols, The Council in Question: A Dialogue with Catholic Traditionalism (Leominster: Gracewing, 2011), 74. 39. Faggioli, Vatican II, 79. 40. Luis Xavier López-Farjeat, “Avicenna and Thomas Aquinas on Natural Prophecy,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 88 (2014): 309-333. Some Islamic Reflections on D’Costa’s Vatican II 297 theology which had dominated the church, being upheld by Franciscans in particular, so too their heirs resumed the struggle in the backrooms of Vatican II. The impact of Gilson (“the great Christian theologians were to become the pupils of the Mohammedan philosophers”41) cannot be underestimated here; while Maritain (a keen member of de Foucauld’s Little Brothers) was also a significant advocate of the turn towards “optimism,”42 an influence which is palpable in the Islamology of his Dominican pupil Louis Gardet (a close colleague of Anawati and yet another influence on the Vatican II committees). Gardet was convinced that Massignon’s ideas were not only important for Islamic studies, but could enrich Christian theology by opening it up to new and fertile perspectives.43 He was another admirer of the ‘simplicity’ of Islam, and also commended what he saw as its ‘humanism’. It was a faith of the fraternity of believers, committed to social justice, hospitality and asy- lum; its culture, unlike that of premodern Europe, was cosmopolitan.44 In his La cité musulmane (1954), Gardet outlined a vision of an Islam that seemed open and hospitable, tolerant of diversity, and yet immov- ably rooted in the sacred; this widely-circulated work may have helped shape episcopal minds during the council, contributing further to the Massignonian tide of philo-Muslim sentiment. For Dominicans of this bent it seemed evident that Muslims and Christians were worshipping the same God, and as D’Costa points out, this was one of the most stunning truths made explicit in the Council documents. His discussion of the extent and nature of the ‘sameness’ is judicious; one must use the word ‘same’ in a careful way when seeking to register Christian definitions of God as triune.45 However the rehabilitation of Jewish theology implied by Nostra Aetate can hardly fail to

41. Étienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955), 183. 42. For his links with Massignon see Jacques Keryell, “Louis Massignon – Jacques Maritain, et leur disciple Louis Gardet,” in Louis Massignon et ses contemporains, ed. Jacques Keryell (Paris: Karthala, 1997), 111-124. According to the Catholic commen- tator Sandro Magister, Maritain was the real author of Paul VI’s 1968 “Credo of the People of God,” a creed which, in Maritain’s draft, included the affirmation that Jews and Muslims also witness to the One God; this section was removed by Paul VI. See Sandro Magister, “The Credo of Paul VI: Who Wrote It, and Why,” at chiesa.espresso. repubblica.it/articolo/204969?eng=y&refresh_ce [accessed 26 March 2016]. 43. Keryell, “Louis Massignon,” 118. 44. Louis Gardet, La cité musulmane, vie sociale et politique (Paris: Vrin, 1954). The same message appears in his Les hommes de l’Islam: approche des mentalités (Paris: Hachette, 1997), 277-294. 45. Cf. Krokus, “Louis Massignon’s Influence,” 331. See Amerio, Iota Unum, 564, for an attack on the Council’s ignoring Islam’s denial of the Trinity and the Incarnation, “the two most important truths of Christianity.” Strangely, Miroslav Volf’s widely-influential 298 tim winter be extended to the classification of the Muslim God; again, the treatment of the ‘two semitisms’ at the Council was implicitly interactive (despite the juxtaposition of the chapters on Judaism and Islam, D’Costa perhaps does not make enough of the category of the ‘semitic’, which, while today sometimes contested, was certainly valid in the minds of the periti46). From this recognition, the way is open to the reinstatement of the old and quite respectable Christian treatment of Islam not as a new religion but as a Christian heresy, which David Burrell characterises as “the most hospitable place Christians have been able to find for Islam,”47 and which D’Costa, while avoiding the word itself, finds to be a positive point of departure, as it denotes Islam’s participation, however occluded, in the history of supernatural revelation.48 Massignon’s vindications of Muslim spiritual integrity had been founded in part on his idea of Islam as a reclamation of Jewish Christian and early Eastern Christian themes and vocabulary; in respecting Islam, the Church is simply welcoming a prodigal son. This train of thought, which has been central for Hans Küng,49 was not attempted at all at the Council, perhaps because the word heresy seemed retrograde and polemical, a legacy of earlier and more judgmental councils; but also because it would open the complex and interesting claim that Islam is closer to Christianity than is Judaism (a judgement which for D’Costa warrants an exclamation mark50). Yet to class Islam as heresy is not so strange, and was self-evident to significant observers such as John of Damascus, Peter the Venerable (as D’Costa notes) and many others (although not to Muslims themselves). monograph on the same topic goes unmentioned. See Volf, Allah: A Christian Response (New York: HarperOne, 2011). 46. The only context in which he juxtaposes Muslims and Jews is the Palestine question. Here the treatment appears insufficient. The Vatican’s reluctance to recognise Israel before 1994 and to express a sympathy with Zionism was not, as D’Costa implies (pp.119-120), the result of a political manoeuvre to take Muslim pressure off Arab Christian minorities, but of a morally serious concern about the Palestinian refugee crisis. See Livia Rokach, The Catholic Church and the Question of Palestine (London: Saqi Books, 1987). Paul VI was “the pope of the Palestinians,” seeing Zionism as an essentially atheistic and Socialist ideology. In 1948, the Church’s infrastructure in Palestine regularly reported on the occupation and ransacking of Catholic buildings by Zionist militias while Arab forces had respected their immunity (Rokach, 33-34). See for a Catholic Palestinian perspective Atallah Kuttab, “My City Denied to Me,” in Jerusalem: The Thrice Loved Land, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Islamabad: Islamic Research Institute, 2011), 119-124. 47. David Burrell, Towards a Jewish-Christian-Muslim Theology (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 179. 48. D’Costa, Vatican II, 183. 49. Hans Küng Islam: Past, Present and Future, transl. John Bowden (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 32-44. 50. D’Costa, Vatican II, 199. Some Islamic Reflections on D’Costa’s Vatican II 299

For Catholicism, the Jewish “Old Testament” seems to point forward in time to Christ; while Islam, along with the Church, claims to look back to him, and this incorporation, which was proclaimed cautiously but loudly in Nostra Aetate, gives the Islam-Christianity relation a unique intimacy. Certainly this was the view of Massignon. This, logically enough, opens up the question, hardly ever raised, of whether the Church’s dialogue with Islam can be classed as a form of ecumenism, a reaching-out to adherents of a Christology which, while far from Nicene orthodoxy, is also the most significant and popular of the ‘heresies’. Here one can imagine links between the mindset of the conciliar fathers as they struggled to disregard the Tridentine maledictions on the reformers, and the emergent new directives on Islam. In both cases, despite the neuralgic issue of Roman primacy, the fresh breeze now blowing through the Vatican was again directed in part by the new optimism about humanity and God’s intentions. The forceful condemnations of ecumenism and dialogue with ‘infidels’ and Protestants, made in Mor- talium Animos (1928) (an encyclical not referred to by D’Costa), were quietly but decisively set aside. This optimism was in turn accompanied by tendencies that the conservatives themselves were condemning as “neo-Protestant.”51 The importance of preached scripture and the enhanced apostolate of the laity were cases in point.52 Some critics were convinced that the new revised and vernacular liturgy was deliberately trying to appeal to the Reformed churches.53 Again, one might see the new openness to Muslims as sym- biotic with this. In a different but still modern age the brilliant apologist Hilaire Belloc had identified Islam, “the most formidable of the heresies,” as “essentially a Reformation,” with “a very great deal in common with Calvinism.”54 Like the Reformers, the founder of Islam had appealed to simplicity and to a general weariness with theological debate and priest- craft. “It was suited to the popular mind,” Belloc added, “in a society where hitherto a restricted class had pursued its quarrels on theology and government.” The sensus fidelium of the People of God would prevail over an ultramontane clerisy. Hence Islam, the true and more successful Reformation, was “in the main Catholic doctrine, oversimplified.”55

51. Lefebvre, cited in Doorly and Nichols, The Council in Question, 60. 52. David Wells, Revolution in Rome (London: Tyndale Press, 1973), 9-15, 85. 53. Cf. Ralph M. Wiltgen, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber (Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1985), 38; Amerio, Iota Unum, 651, documents instances of Protestant welcome for the new mass. 54. Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (London: Sheed and Ward, 1938), 92, 83, 80. 55. Ibid., 77. 300 tim winter

From this we could infer that the atmospheres which had engendered the great Reformation which was Islam, the lesser Reformation of the sixteenth century, and the post-war liberal euphoria of the West, had triggered analogous shifts. At Vatican II, the end of the age-old Catholic polemic against the Saracen went hand-in-hand with what some called “the end of the Counter-Reformation.”56 A historically-recurrent alternative theme had broken surface again and made significant inroads. This new spirit could have unexpected outcomes. The ‘counter- Syllabus’ would do away with the relics of state Catholicism and its historic marginalising of the Reformation churches. An unintended con- sequence of Dignitatis Humanae was to generate a new area of disagree- ment between Catholics, on the one hand, and Muslims who in various ways were seeking to preserve the idea of a state religion enjoying legal privileges. Compared to Quanta Cura (1864), with its firm anathematising of the claim that “liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s per- sonal right,” (§3) one notes the entirely different position of, say, the 2010 instrumentum laboris of the Middle Eastern Synod of Bishops, which calls on Muslims to “eliminate the theocratic character of government and allow for greater equality among citizens of different religions, thereby fostering the promotion of a sound democracy, positively secular in nature.”57 Nostra Aetate built a bridge with Islam, but another momentous initiative of the Council created a new challenge which in recent years has often dominated and problematised the dialogue. A further area of relevance to the Muslim-Catholic equation is the liturgical renewal presaged by the Council, which quickly led to the promulgation of the Novus Ordo mass. If lex orandi lex credendi, the new liturgy must have exercised a transformative influence over the minds and souls of Catholics as they contemplated other religions. It is not a matter of the excision of specifically problematic passages such as that which referred to ‘perfidious’ Jews, since no corresponding ritual references to Muslims existed, but of the conception of God and humanity which the rites bespeak. There is no space here to assess this properly. But from a Muslim perspective a question at least deserves to be asked. If various nostalgics for the Tridentine rite are claiming that the new missal is the clearest sign of the closet Lutheranism of the ‘new Church’, with a liturgy of the word, with more scripture and preaching, the loss

56. Joseph Komonchak in Giuseppe Alberigo, ed., History of Vatican II, English version edited by Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, and Leuven: Peeters, 1995-2006), I: 326; also Wells, Revolution, 100. 57. Synod of Bishops, Special Assembly for the Middle East, “The Catholic Church in the Middle East: Communion and Witness,” available on www.vatican.va. Some Islamic Reflections on D’Costa’s Vatican II 301 of a clear sense of propitiatory sacrifice in favour of praise and thanksgiv- ing, and a new sense of the full participation of the laity, with the priest ‘presiding’ as much as interceding, a relative minimising of human sinfulness and (again), a “semi-Pelagianism,”58 even, then are these not also characteristics of Islamic worship? Again, Islam as Belloc’s ‘greater Ref- ormation’ would seem to be observing a gentle Catholic convergence upon its esprit and its forms, bringing presumably a greater capacity to respond empathetically to its theology. Yet matters are not so straightfor- ward! Benedict’s new missal of 2011 may be said to have moderated or even reversed some of these tendencies. Moreover the abandonment of Latin, perhaps the most controversial novelty, hardly segues into Muslim conceptions of how formal worship should be: Lefebvre, the former arch- bishop of Dakar, commented wistfully on Islam’s ability to retain its power through retaining its sacred language.59 The reduction or abolition of kneeling during mass, and of times of silence, a loss of hieratic dignity in the ars celebrandi, and the tendency of priests to face their congregations in an anthropocentric shift which reduces the symbolism of their membership of those congregations, were also major changes which, for Muslims, will militate against any simple celebration of the reforms as a generalised migration of Catholicism in the direction of Muslim sensi- bilities, and as a moment in the Church’s history to be unreservedly welcomed.60 These reflections have been prompted by the richness and determi- nation of D’Costa’s book. Considering the issues one begins to understand why so many assessments of Vatican II are spread over several volumes. D’Costa has chosen to focus ‘exclusively’ on just one of the important topics related to the alleged doctrinal shifts in Nostra Aetate and Lumen Gentium: the claim that both religions adore a single Lord. This was, perhaps, the easiest of the claims to defend for those concerned with the continuity of the formal magisterium. The other controversies, such as the nature of Islam’s Abrahamic filiation and the status of Mus- lim revelation, are dealt with ably, but only in the context of the ‘same

58. Uwe Michael Lang, “Translating the Missale Romanum: Towards a Sacral Vernacular,” in Benedict XVI and the Roman Missal: Proceedings of the Fourth Fota Inter- national Liturgical Conference, 2011, ed. Janet Elaine Rutherford and James O’Brien (Dublin: Four Courts Press, and New York: Scepter Publishers, 2013), 245-259, p. 257. 59. Lefebvre, Open Letter, 40. 60. One could also add the (post-Conciliar) demotion of the significance of fast- ing, a fundamental and arduous rite for Muslims, but which, according to Duffy’s account of the situation of lay Catholics, “has effectively been abandoned, or turned into a private, individualistic and therefore invisible devotional option” (Duffy, Faith of our Fathers, 181). 302 tim winter

God’ problematic; the approach overall is highly focussed. One would wish, perhaps, for a much broader consideration of the issues as a whole, against the backdrop of the ‘spirit of Vatican II’, the cognitive frame which engendered it, and its deeper implications for the metabolic relations between Islam and Catholic Christianity and their respective orientations towards God. One hopes that he will attend to this needful task in a future study.

Tim Winter gained his first degree in Arabic from Cambridge University in 1983, after which he studied for six years in traditional Islamic institutions in the Middle East, before returning to take up his present post in Cambridge since 1997. His publications include translations of ethical and mystical texts by al-Ghazali (d. 1111), a series of articles on Islamic theology and Muslim- Christian relations, and two theological books in Turkish. In 2006 he published Abraham’s Children, co-edited with Bishop Richard Harries and Rabbi Normon Solomon. He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology (2008). Address: Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, West Road, Cambridge CB3 9BS, United Kingdom. Email: [email protected].