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Sep. 18 (CWNews.com) - Editor's note: The following is the prepared text
from which Pope Benedict XVI spoke as he addressed an academic audience at
the University of Regensburg on September 12. As he actually delivered it,
the speech differed slightly. Because the speech has aroused an unusual
amount of debate-- particularly regarding the Pope's references to Islam and
to religious violence-- CWN strongly recommends reading the entire text. For
follow-up stories and analysis see the CWN home page.
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a moving experience for me to stand and give a lecture at this
university podium once again. I think back to those years when, after a
pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the
University of Bonn. This 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: the reality 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 skepticism 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 (Münster) 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 probably 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 the responses of the learned Persian.
The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the
Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of
man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the three
Laws: the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur'an. In this lecture
I would like to discuss only one point-- itself rather marginal to the
dialogue itself-- 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 edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches
on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that surah
2, 256 reads: There is no compulsion in religion. It 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 Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details,
such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book”
and the “infidels,” he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the
central question on the relationship between religion and violence in
general, in these words:
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 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 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 Hazn 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 practice idolatry.
As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is
concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges
us directly. 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, 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
declares simply that he is, is already presents a challenge to the notion of
myth, to which Socrates's 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
perhaps 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
ultimately 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 Hazn 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 unlikeness remains infinitely greater than
likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language (cf.
Lateran IV). 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 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 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 program of dehellenization: although
interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their
motivations and objectives.
Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the fundamental postulates
of the Reformation in the 16th 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 program 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 19th and 20th 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 program 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. I
will not 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 favor of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a
humanitarian moral message. The fundamental 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 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
radicalized 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.
We shall 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: 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” 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 milieux. 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 marvelous 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 the will to be obedient to
the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the
basic tenets of Christianity. 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 program with which a theology grounded in Biblical
faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act reasonably (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.
[ Portada ]