Word: manuel
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When Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an erudite Persian debated in 1391 about Islam and Christianity, Constantinople was under a siege that would eventually succeed, some decades later, in bringing down the last bastion of the Roman Empire. They argued about the balance of reason and faith, specifically in its application to proselytizing through force...
Essentially, Benedict XVI was debating freely and openly like Manuel II and his Persian interlocutor had once done. Drawing from other speeches given during his Bavarian escapade, and last year’s encyclical letter entitled Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”), we can conclude the once-called “rottweiler” Cardinal Ratzinger molded into a truly ecumenical pontiff. He quotes enlightened philosophes, concelebrates with rabbis and patriarchs, and is quite fond of neo-Platonic reasoning in his homilies. He even repeatedly quotes passages in the Qur’an. In short...
...Pope’s speech—which most of these protesters never bothered to read— closed with an remarkable thought the obtuse Byzantine emperor Manuel would have never allowed: He said debates about faith should return to the rational stage of a university. Just like Regensburg; just like our own campus...
...Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." POPE BENEDICT XVI, quoting the 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus during a lecture in Germany...
...reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (M?nster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures...