Joshua Trevino at The Brussels Journal describes how contrasting Orthodox Christian and Islamic attitudes to warfare seem to have handicapped the Byzantine Empire in its long struggle for survival.
There's an illuminating historical incident from the tenth century that deserves wider dissemination, and that the Pope might have used in lieu of Manuel II Paleologue's quote. That Emperor was the last to enjoy a full reign in a free Empire; but nearly four hundred years before, the Empire was enjoying a resurgence. Manuel II Paleologue ruled barely more than Constantinople itself - but Nikephoros II Fokas ruled from Italy to the Caucasus, and from Bulgaria to Syria. He was a longtime foe of the Muslim Caliphate, and he observed that a signal advantage of the Muslims was their jihad doctrine. The Orthodox Church then - as now - regarded war as a regrettable necessity, with emphasis on the regrettable part, and soldiers returning from war would be made to perform some manner of penance before again receiving communion. By contrast, Nikephoros II Fokas observed that the Muslims who went to war were directly fulfilling the commandments of their faith, and were accordingly more motivated, violent, and relentless. The Emperor decided that the Christians needed a similar spiritual edge, and so he asked the Patriarch Polyeuktos in Constantinople to declare that any Christian who fell in battle was automatically a martyr. In effect, he requested a Christian version of jihad. The Patriarch and the entire Church hierarchy, so often in that era mere tools of Imperial policy, refused. The Emperor was forced to back down, and within a few short centuries, the Empire was overrun by the Muslims.
It's a little-known turning-point - and certainly a relevant one for this day and age. As we look toward the plight of the Christians of the Middle East at large, we must be reminded that they are an embattled minority in large part because their doctrinal precepts are simply more humane. And as we look at the reflexive moves toward conciliation of the deathly host denouncing Benedict XVI - including, in a grim confirmation of Scruton's warning of a "religion without irony," Hamas, Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah! - we must be reminded that the lulling effect of that humanity renders too many of us incapable of grasping the awful magnitude of the peril before us. The Pope's crime, in the minds of the Muslim masses denouncing him, is to allude to precisely this. The superior creed in the eyes of history may be that with the more force and fury on its side; but in the eyes of history's God, the criteria for rectitude are doubtless rather different.
