addressed thus was none other than King David.
Another paradoxical aspect of the papacy is that this eminently conservative institution has allowed progress to be maintained.
I shall illustrate this with an example which may appear trivial: when I was a child, a Catholic woman could not go to mass without covering her head and shoulders. Things had always been thus, and no believer, whether a serving girl or a queen, was allowed to transgress the rule, which the priests applied with zeal and sometimes humour. That makes me recall the priest who approached one of his flock and gave her an apple. When the young woman expressed surprise, he told her that it was only after tasting the apple that Eve realised that she was naked.
The poor woman was certainly not naked; all she had done was wear her long hair down, but clothing requirements could not be broken — until the moment in the early 1960s when the Vatican decided that henceforth women were allowed to attend church without a veil. I suppose that some people must have been irritated or even outraged by a decision that ran counter to an ancient tradition dating all the way back to Saint Paul. He had after all written in his first epistle to the Corinthians:
For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels.
Nonetheless, overnight these words from another age were deemed obsolete; no one tried to insist that Catholic women cover their heads, and it is reasonable to suppose that this advance will not be called into question.
Let me repeat because this is the point I want to make: the popes may have restrained any relaxation of the rule on clothing for nineteen centuries, but from the moment when they judged that this position no longer had any justification, from the moment when they finally took stock of how attitudes had changed, they proceeded to validate the change, so to speak, rendering it virtually irreversible.
In the history of the West, the institution of the church has often functioned in this way, contributing to the material and moral advance of European civilisation, and yet all the while attempting to restrain it. Whether in the domain of science, economics, politics or social behaviour, and especially in matters of sexuality, the papacy’s attitude has followed the same course. At the start, the church digs in, applies the brakes, fulminates, threatens, condemns and forbids. Then, after time (sometimes centuries) has passed, it reviews, re-examines and moderates its position. Next, with some reluctance, it accommodates itself to the verdict of human societies. The change is validated — codified, in a manner of speaking, on the register of permitted behaviour. From that moment on, there is no further tolerance of zealots who might wish to reverse things.
For centuries, the Catholic church refused to believe that the earth was round and orbited the sun. And, when it came to the origin of species, it initially condemned Darwin and evolution. Today, it would crack down on any of its bishops who interpreted the holy texts in too literal a manner, as some Arabic
The prevailing mistrust in the Muslim tradition, as in the Protestant one, of a centralising religious authority is perfectly legitimate and thoroughly democratic in its inspiration, but it has a disastrous side-effect: without that intolerable centralising authority, no progress can be irrevocably recorded.
Even when believers have lived their faith for decades in the most generous, enlightened, tolerant fashion possible, they are never completely beyond risk of a ‘relapse’, never shielded from some zealous interpretation coming along to sweep away their gains. Again — whether in the domain of science, economics, politics or social behaviour — something a benevolent
Regression is also the word that comes to mind when I read that some US schools which used to offer a rational education have suddenly begun to teach the next generation that the world was created six thousand years ago — on 22 October 4004 BCE, to be precise — and that if fossils are found on earth which seem to date from hundreds of millions of years ago, that is because God aged them through some miracle and placed them there to test the strength of our faith.
In general, strange and worrying beliefs are on the rise, which blithely announce the end of the world and even work to hasten it. These trends probably only affect a small proportion of Christians, some tens of millions of people. But the influence of that minority is not insignificant, given that it is situated in the United States and its members assiduously frequent the corridors of power, sometimes managing to influence the behaviour of the world’s sole superpower.
There are a thousand other things I could say, a thousand eloquent examples, to illustrate the impact of institutional, cultural, national or more generally historical factors on the comparative evolution of the two civilisations to which I belong — and the lack of impact of properly doctrinal differences.
My profound conviction is that too much weight is placed on the influence of religion on people, and too little on the influence of people on religion. From the moment in the fourth century when the Roman empire became Christian, Christianity became Roman — abundantly so. It is this historical circumstance which explains the emergence of a sovereign papacy. Taking a wider view, if Christianity contributed to making Europe what it became, Europe also contributed to making Christianity what it became. The two pillars of Western civilisation — Roman law and Athenian democracy — both pre-date Christianity.
Similar observations could be made about Islam and also about non-religious doctrines. If Communism influenced the history of Russia and China, those two countries also determined the history of Communism, whose destiny would have been very different if it had instead triumphed in Germany or England. Foundational texts, whether they are sacred or profane, lend themselves to the most contradictory readings. Hearing Deng Xiaoping claim that privatisation was in direct line with Marxist thought and that the successes of his economic reform demonstrated the superiority of socialism over capitalism may provoke smiles. But this interpretation is no more laughable than any other. In fact, it is certainly more in keeping with the dreams of the author of
No one can deny, in any case, seeing the Chinese experiment unfold, that one of the most surprising successes in the history of global capitalism has happened under the aegis of a Communist Party. Is that not a powerful illustration of the malleability of doctrines and the infinite ability of people to interpret them any way they like?
To return to the Muslim world: if we try to understand the political behaviour of those who claim religious legitimacy and wish to change it, we will not identify the problem by searching holy texts, nor will the texts provide an answer. Hastily explaining everything that happens in different Muslim societies through the ‘particularity’ of Islam is to indulge in platitudes and condemn oneself to ignorance and impotence.
Chapter 5
For anyone attempting to understand contemporary reality, the notion that religions, ethnic identities and cultures are unique is a useful one, but it requires careful handling. If you disregard it, you will miss its subtleties; if you accord it too much importance, you will fail to grasp the essential.
Today, uniqueness is also an ambiguous notion. Was apartheid not expressly founded on ‘respect for the
