So, the Pope delivers a speech in which he speaks about violence in the name of religion and quotes a Byzantine ruler fighting off Islamic armies and the response among the most stridently Islamic nations in the world has been acts of violence. Maybe I don’t understand things as well as I should, but doesn’t this sort of prove the Pope’s point?
Here is the full text of his speech, by the way.
Full text of Pope Benedict XVI’s speech at the University of
Regensburg,
ENI-06-0747
Rome, 18 September (ENI)–Here is a Vatican translation of the
address Benedict XVI delivered on 12 September at the University
of Regensburg, where he was a professor and vice rector from 1969
to 1971.
Faith, Reason and the University
Memories and Reflections
It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the
university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this
podium. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period
at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University
of Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made
up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither
assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much
direct contact with students and in particular among the
professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in
the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with
historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between
the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies
academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before
the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine
experience of universitas – something that you too, Magnificent
Rector, just mentioned – the experience, in other words, of the
fact that despite our specializations which at times make it
difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole,
working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with
its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use
of reason – this reality became a lived experience. The
university was also very proud of its two theological faculties.
It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of
faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of
the "whole" of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone
could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with
reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the
universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once
reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about
our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that
did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical
scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the
question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the
context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the
university as a whole, was accepted without question.
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by
Professor Theodore Khoury (Muenster) 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 of faith contained in
the Bible and in the Quran, and deals especially with the image
of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the
relationship between – as they were called – three "Laws" or
"rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the
Quran. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the
present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point -
itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole – which, in the
context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting
and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on
this issue.
In the seventh conversation (controversy) edited by Professor
Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The
emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no
compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of
the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless
and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the
instructions, developed later and recorded in the Quran,
concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the
difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and
the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling
brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the
central question about the relationship between religion and
violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed 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". The emperor, after having expressed himself so
forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why
spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.
Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of
the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood – and not
acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of
the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs
the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without
violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does
not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means
of threatening a person with death…".
The decisive statement in this argument against violent
conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is
contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes:
For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this
statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is
absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our
categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work
of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn
Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his
own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth
to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise
idolatry.
At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the
concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an
unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably
contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and
intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound
harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and
the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first
verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible,
John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the
beginning was the logos". This is the very word used by the
emperor: God acts, with logos. Logos means both reason and word -
a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication,
precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the
biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome
and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and
synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God,
says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message
and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint
Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a
Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help
us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) – this vision can be interpreted as a
"distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement
between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.
In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some
time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush,
a name which separates this God from all other divinities with
their many names and simply declares "I am", already presents a
challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates’ attempt to
vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the
Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came
to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel,
an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as
the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula
which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This
new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of
enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of
gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus,
despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who
sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous
cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period,
encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting
in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom
literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old
Testament produced at Alexandria – the Septuagint – is more than
a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory)
translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual
witness and a distinct and important step in the history of
revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that
was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound
encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter
between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart
of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek
thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to
act "with logos" is contrary to God’s nature.
In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we
find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between
the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the
so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose
with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments,
led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata.
Beyond this is the realm of God’s freedom, in virtue of which he
could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done.
This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn
Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is
not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and
otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true
and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest
possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his
actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has
always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal
Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real
analogy, in which – as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated
- unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to
the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not
become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer,
impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God
who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and
continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as
Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of
perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it
continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently,
Christian worship is, again to quote Paul – worship in harmony
with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).
This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek
philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not
only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also
from that of world history – it is an event which concerns us
even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that
Christianity, despite its origins and some significant
developments in the East, finally took on its historically
decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other
way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the
Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what
can rightly be called Europe.
The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an
integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call
for a dehellenization of Christianity – a call which has more and
more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the
modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in
the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they
are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and
objectives.
Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates
of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the
tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were
confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy,
that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien
system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a
living historical Word but as one element of an overarching
philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the
other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as
originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a
premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be
liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant
stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room
for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism
that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored
faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to
reality as a whole.
The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with
Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a
student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme
was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its
point of departure Pascal’s distinction between the God of the
philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my
inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue,
and I do not intend to repeat here what I said on that occasion,
but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about
this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack’s central idea was
to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message,
underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of
hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of
the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put
an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was
presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message.
Fundamentally, Harnack’s goal was to bring Christianity back into
harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from
seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith
in Christ’s divinity and the triune God. In this sense,
historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it,
restored to theology its place within the university: theology,
for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore
strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about
Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and
consequently it can take its rightful place within the
university. Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation
of reason, classically expressed in Kant’s "Critiques", but in
the meantime further radicalised by the impact of the natural
sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it
briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and
empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology.
On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of
matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to
understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic
premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern
understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature’s
capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the
possibility of verification or falsification through
experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between
the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one
side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod
has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.
This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue
we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from
the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be
considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science
must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human
sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy,
attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A
second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by
its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making
it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question.
Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of
science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.
I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be
observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain
theology’s claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing
Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must
say more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it
is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically
human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions
raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the
purview of collective reason as defined by "science", so
understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the
subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his
experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion,
and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what
is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their
power to create a community and become a completely personal
matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we
see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which
necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of
religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct
an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and
sociology, end up being simply inadequate.
Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading,
I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which
is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural
pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with
Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary
inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures.
The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple
message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in
order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieus.
This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in
precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the
imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity
as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the
evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated
into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made
about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason
are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant
with the nature of faith itself.
And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad
strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing
to do with putting the clock back to the time before the
Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The
positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged
unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous
possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the
progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific
ethos, moreover, is – as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent
Rector – the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it
embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of
the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of
retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept
of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new
possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising
from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can
overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and
faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed
limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we
once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology
rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging
dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and
one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry
into the rationality of faith.
Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of
cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western
world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the
forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the
world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the
divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most
profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and
which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is
incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same
time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with
its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question
which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its
methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept
the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between
our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a
given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question
why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be
remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of
thought – to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit
in a different way, for theology, listening to the great
experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity,
and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of
knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction
of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something
Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many
false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates
says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so
annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life
he despised and mocked all talk about being – but in this way he
would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a
great loss". The West has long been endangered by this aversion
to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only
suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole
breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is
the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith
enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not
to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel
II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response
to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this
breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of
cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the
university.
NOTE:
The Holy Father intends to supply a subsequent version of this
text, complete with footnotes. The present text must therefore be
considered provisional.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html
(c) Copyright 2006 – Libreria Editrice Vaticana [3965 words]
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