Although President Bush’s coinage of ‘the war on terror’ was not altogether precise, the expression was a wake up call to all denizens of civilized cultures to understand our predicament: we find ourselves in a world-wide conflict with militant Islam, and we’ve been immersed in that conflict since well before September 11, 2001.

The anniversary of this tragedy always invites—even requires—our thoughtful reflection. George Weigel has cogently outlined some truths that we “cannot not know” six years after the event. Writes Weigel:

We can’t not know the name of the enemy: the name is jihadism, that form of Islamic extremism which teaches that it is the duty of every Muslim to use any means available to advance the prospects of a world that acknowledges the sovereignty of Allah and lives under shari’a law. That jihadists are a small minority of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims is both true and irrelevant. What counts is cultural morale, and the morale of jihadists may be higher today than it was six years ago.

We can’t not know that jihadists read history through the prism of their theological convictions. The West, tutored by a progressive view of history, read the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as a victory for freedom. Jihadists read it as a victory for jihadism, a Phase One triumph in an ongoing war against the infidels. Phase Two, which jihadists imagined might be easier than Phase One, had the United States as its target. Attacks on American embassies in East Africa in the mid-1990s were intended to trigger a struggle in which the United States would be defeated as the Soviet Union was defeated in Phase One. When that didn’t work, jihadists blew a hole in the side of the U.S.S. Cole as it was refueling in the harbor at Aden. When that didn’t elicit the expected response, Osama bin Laden concluded that an outrage impossible for the Americans to ignore was required. Thus 9/11.

Whether life-long radicals like bin Laden, or late-comers to the cause like Mohamed Atta—who it would appear found a quick way out of an excruciating nihilistic emptiness in a jihadist fire-ball—jihadists are today a formidable enemy to be contended with for the foreseeable future. How we are to understand this, and how we are to deal with it—as I wrote a year ago—continue to be core questions at the heart of a dark and complex human conflict.

Thankfully, Pope Benedict has been affording us over the last year some breathtaking insights into our situation. From his speech at Regensburg one year ago tomorrow, to his recent visit to Austria, the Pontiff has not lost an opportunity to get at the very core of the conflict, namely, our conflicting conceptions about the limits, possibilities and purpose of human reason.

We should be quick to recall, however, the Holy Father’s insistence that the potential for disaster here originates not only from within jihadism, but also from within western secularism.

Western secularists have been quick to point to “religion” as the danger—lumping all persons of any kind of religious conviction in the same ruinous category with the jihadists. But follow Benedict’s line of reasoning, and you’ll realize who’s really making odd and dangerous bedfellows with whom. Addressing the members of Austrian government and diplomatic corps during his recent visit there last weekend, the Pope had this to say:

Yet another part of the European heritage is a tradition of thought which considers as essential a substantial correspondence between faith, truth and reason. Here the issue is whether or not reason stands at the beginning and foundation of all things. The issue is whether reality originates by chance and necessity, and thus whether reason is merely a chance by-product of the irrational and, in an ocean of irrationality, it too, in the end, is meaningless, or whether instead the underlying conviction of Christian faith remains true: In principio erat Verbum—in the beginning was the Word; at the origin of everything is the creative reason of God who decided to make himself known to us human beings.

Once again, the Holy Father is insisting that one of the greatest single challenges facing humanity today is our need to come to terms with what we think and believe about human reason.

If we share the Holy Father’s understanding, then reason—logos, ratio—which is to say ultimate meaning, the solid ground upon which we can understand our situation in the universe, is not only a possibility to be attained, but something in which we as human beings share by our very God-given nature.

For others, for secularists of many stripes, our situation could not be more to the contrary: we find ourselves afloat in a chaotic, meaning-less, maelstrom in which our ability to think and reason is simply a momentary blip on the evolutionary screen, an aberration in an otherwise infinitely disordered void.

The disturbing characteristic of modernity which has had the Pope's attention for decades now is the West's growing irrationality. In a word, the Holy Father holds that faith without reason (religious fanaticism) and reason without faith (secularism) are dangerous paths for humanity. On either path, mankind can fall prey to what the Pope has termed a "dictatorship of relativism." Consequently, western secularists’ disenchantment with logos, reason, notions of ultimate purpose, and the ‘truth’ about things, places them within a hair’s breadth of the same close-minded rejection of reason exhibited by jihadism. And it disposes them to their own brand of fanaticism.

As to the current conflict with jihadism, I agree with George Weigel that it is a battle to be fought on multiple fronts, many of them non-military. The latter includes prayer for the conversion of our enemy; it also includes—in the U.S. in particular—“cleaning up our own cultural act,” as Weigel puts it: “a country whose principal exports include pornography is not in a particularly strong moral position in a struggle against a religiously-shaped alternative vision of human goods.”

As to the secularists—prayer here too would be a good thing, especially beseeching that they might realize the inanity of denying the meaning-fullness of those ‘big questions’ whose validity they implicitly affirm in the very act of rejecting them. Here a thought from the philosopher Eric Voeglin is apropos:

Since [these] questions cannot be answered by propositions referring to events in the external world, an epistemologist of the positivist persuasion will dismiss them as pseudo-questions … devoid of meaning. [T]hrough several thousand years of history to this day [most people] do not consider them meaningless at all, even if they find the adequate articulation of their meaning sometimes a baffling task. The denial of meaning runs counter to the empirical fact that they rise again and again as meaningful from the experience of reality. Hence the act of denial, especially when it appears in the context of a philosophical school or movement, must be characterized as the sectarian idiosyncrasy of men who have lost contact with reality and whose intellectual and spiritual growth has been so badly stunted that the meaning escapes them.

Benedict articulated his perspective on human reason and the state of western culture in Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, a work he authored shortly before his election as Pope. It is the bedrock of his considerations about reason, Europe, the crisis of western secularism, and more. (If you are interested in learning more about Benedict’s reflections, you can read my series of commentaries about the book here.)

“Our greatest need in the present historical moment,” wrote Benedict, “is people who… keep their eyes fixed on God, learning from him what true humanity means.” Indeed, the enduring value of all those genuinely humanizing elements that western civilization has to offer may well be our last best hope in the face of both reason-less jihadism and reason-less secularism.

In "The Ecumenic Age," Vol. 4 of Order and History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1974), 316-317.

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