Patriarch Howayek’s Lebanon: An Opening to Universality (4/4)
Was Patriarch Elias Howayek’s vision of a pluralistic Lebanon ever a viable historical project, given that the forces reshaping the Arab world throughout the twentieth century – decolonization, the rise of nationalism, the growth of political Islam, and the backlash against Western modernity – were largely moving in the opposite direction? Is Lebanon an “error of history,” as some have claimed while doing everything they could to make us lose faith in ourselves? Was the patriarch’s pluralistic vision a prescient recognition of the Middle East’s diversity, or a bold historical gamble gradually undermined by the major developments of the twentieth century?
To answer these questions, the patriarch’s decision to embrace a pluralistic Lebanon must be placed within the long arc of Middle Eastern history, rather than evaluated solely through the lens of Lebanon's domestic crises.
Seen in that light, his project stands out as a rare attempt to give institutional expression to religious diversity at a time when the region’s dominant political currents favored rigid, homogenizing models. The enduring tension between these two competing logics helps explain many of the structural challenges Lebanon has faced over the past century, while also highlighting the historical distinctiveness of its political experiment.
One can go a step further by shifting the analysis from geopolitics to the history of religion and ideas. This approach raises the question of the relationship between a Christian theology of universality and the political conception of religious pluralism as it is recognized and practiced in Lebanon.
It is therefore necessary to acknowledge that Patriarch Elias Howayek’s decision to champion a pluralistic Lebanon stemmed not only from political calculation but also from a Christian understanding of the human person. The “Lebanese project” thus constituted – perhaps less clearly than it appears today – the political expression of a universal Christian anthropology, with its own defining characteristics: the distinction between the spiritual and the temporal; the centrality of civic citizenship; the separation of powers; respect for religious freedom; and the recognition of diversity and pluralism as normal features of society.
More broadly, Patriarch Howayek’s project emerged at the dawn of a century during which Christianity as a whole underwent a far-reaching movement toward greater openness. Several converging developments can be identified: the expansion of missionary activity, which emphasized Christianity’s universal vocation rather than its national roots; the affirmation of human rights in the Church’s social teaching initiated by Leo XIII; and the growth of the ecumenical movement, which sought to overcome the confessional divisions among Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. The Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s, would ultimately enshrine this evolution. It echoed many of the very intuitions that Patriarch Howayek had articulated forty years earlier: religious freedom; interfaith dialogue and recognition of the values present in other religious traditions, particularly Islam; openness to the modern world (aggiornamento); openness to the laity and to ecclesial apostolic movements; openness to ecumenism and reconciliation with the Orthodox world; common Christological declarations, and so on.
The contrast between these orientations and those that would shape the Arab world and the Middle East is not difficult to discern: genocide and ethnic cleansing in Turkey; cruel and bloody totalitarian regimes in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt; the creation of an apartheid “Jewish state”; the rise of political Islam (the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian Islamic Revolution), and so on.
This argument certainly opens a debate that must be approached with nuance: Christianity should not be portrayed as inherently pluralistic in all times and places. Christian history, including in Lebanon, has also witnessed episodes of confessionalism, intolerance, and close alliances between political power and religion.
Howayek’s originality stands out all the more clearly. His choice in favor of pluralism allowed Lebanon to escape the determinisms that shaped totalitarian states. Let us repeat the point: Lebanon’s history should not be judged solely through the lens of its internal crises or through the demonization of political confessionalism as the source of all its ills. On the contrary, from our acknowledged, moderate, and protected diversity emerged one of the most profound and original human experiences of the twentieth century – an experience that we must equip with institutions capable of ensuring its flourishing and stability.
A fortunate “error,” one that has given us such a homeland.
Read also:
Howayek and the Elevation of Lebanese Women’s Role (3/4)
“Love of the Homeland,” Patriarch Howayek’s Spiritual Testament (2/4)