Violence, Truth, and the Perfection of Allah -- Pope Benedict's Dilemma

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. -- 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' -- Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

--(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance)

Which brings us, naturally, to the Pope and his remarks on Islam.

What a dilemma!  To be the leader of a 2,000 year-old institution.  To be the leader of an institution that regards itself as 'the deposit of faith,' and be obliged to take a fiduciary's care of that deposit.  Agree with Emerson if you will, but if it is your money in the bank, the last thing you want is to find out that your savings account has 50% less than it ought to have because, says your bank manager, "a foolish consistency in bookkeeping is the hobgoblin of little minds."  If your freedom is on the line, the last thing you want is a judge who says "you're going to jail because the law yesterday is not the law today, and the great soul of the judiciary has nothing to do with consistency."  If the liberty of the nation is at stake, the last thing you want is a president who says "before my election I respected the law, but today I do not, and anyone who wants to impeach me merely misunderestimates my greatness."   Whatever else he was talking about when he invoked the hobgoblin of consistency, Emerson was not talking about institutions.

Back in the mid-1990s, the Catholic Church undertook one of the great missions of this (or any other) time: Pope John-Paul II undertook to apologize for sins committed in the name of the Church.  In fact, apology for the excesses of Catholics was a signal part of John Paul's priorities for the Church.  One of his first undertakings was reversal of the excommunication of Galileo, with a reassessment of the errors of the Church in its treatment of the man, and of the mission of science.  This was only the beginning of John Paul's reassesments.  

In all, the Pope apologized for wrongs done by the Catholic community more than 100 separate times during his papacy.  In the 1980s,his apologies included the intolerance and violence of the Inquisition (1982), the wrongful acts of missionaries (1984), the treatment of Africans (1985), and the oppression of native peoples, the destruction of their cultures, and suppression and destruction of whole ways of life (1987). In the 1990s the Pope extended apologies for the Crusades (1995), discrimination against women (1995),  actions against non-Catholics throughout history (1995), failures of conscience during the Nazi era (1997), and inadequate spiritual resistance to Nazism (1998).  

He lived with a spirit of contrition. In 1994, the Pope's apostolic letter On The Coming of the Third Millennium asked the Church to enter its 2,000th year by purification through the task of remembering the past sins of its members.  So the Pope began to prepare the Church for a great examination of conscience that would culminating in a message of apology to be declared on March 17, 2000, the solemn First Sunday of Lent.

But that kind of undertaking was more than just a notion.  
Some very tough questions were raised by the prospect of apology.  What incidents should be included in the apologies?  Should the apologies be limited to specific deeds, or should they encompass the acts of whole eras?  Should the apologies be directed solely to God and, if not, to whom should they be directed?  

Just  exactly who was apologizing?  If the Catholic faithful could collectively be guilty of, say, the sin of anti-Semitism, then Jews could collectively be guilty of the murder of Christ, right?  Well ... that can't be right.  So, was the apology to be an expression of collective Catholic guilt, or should the very notion of collective guilt be repudiated?   If repudiated, then what was the Pope doing apologizing at all -- why not hold individuals responsible for individual sin -- and isn't that what individual confession is for?  How can the acts and sensibilities of past centuries be meaningfully criticized in present times, through the prism of contemporary understandings?  

Theses were pernicious questions.  They were raised -- presumably in good faith -- by powerful members of the Magisterium, by influential theologians and scholars, and by many of the laity.

A particularly pernicious question arose in addition to those others.  It was this: can The Church sin?  Not -- could any particular Pope or Inquisitor sin; not -- could this Crusader or that slaveholder sin, but can The Church ... The Mystical Body of Christ On Earth ... can it sin?  

It doesn't really matter whether you believe the Catholic Church is the Body of Christ, or not.  What matters is that you take very seriously the fact that a billion people do believe it, and over its 2,000-year history, another billion or so people have believed it.  What matters is that this belief has been held ever since Paul first taught it to the church at Corinth.  What matters is that the belief has been consistent.  

There's that word.

In 1999, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was the Prefect of the Catholic Church's Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which meant that he was responsible in a singular way for making sure that -- so to speak -- all the books of account in this Deposit of Faith, added up.  As a practical matter, Cardinal Ratzinger was responsible to see that statements issuing from the Vatican trenching on Doctrine were consistent with previous statements of Doctrine.  

It may be an imperfect analogy, but look at it this way: when issuing its opinions, the Supreme Court takes great care to observe the precedents set by its previous opinions, and to adhere to the principle of stare decisis, so that new cases are decided consistently with previously decided cases.  The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith tries to ensure consistency -- over the ages -- in no less a task than communication of Truth itself.  Again, it doesn't matter if you believe that such a task is possible or even desirable; what matters is that billions of people have and do.

Whatever you believe, you've got to know that it's a big job.  It is, profoundly, a job for a rational man, a man of reason.  Because in order to be consistent with doctrine, as with precedents of law, you have to be able carefully to follow the reasoning of the past, and reason through to its consistent application in the present.  

Perhaps more than anyone else, Cardinal Ratzinger struggled with the difficult doctrinal issues surrounding the apologies, including very much the question whether the Church, as Church, could sin.  

The Vatican's International Theological Commission, under the guidance of Cardinal Ratzinger,  drafted a document called  Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past.  In it, the Commission, consistent with the belief that because Christ cannot sin, then the Church as the mystical Body of Christ cannot sin, clarified that the task of memory undertaken in the Jubilee Year was to be

"an act of courage and humility in recognizing the wrongs done by those who have borne or bear the name of Christian." It is based on the conviction that because of "the bond which unites us to one another in the Mystical Body, all of us, though not personally responsible and without encroaching on the judgment of God, who alone knows every heart, bear the burden of the errors and faults of those who have gone before us."

Please -- try to understand just how momentous an occasion this was. As Memory and Reconciliation acknowledged,

[I]n the entire history of the Church there are no precedents for requests for forgiveness by the Magisterium for past wrongs. Councils and papal decrees applied sanctions, to be sure, to abuses of which clerics and laymen were found guilty, and many pastors sincerely strove to correct them. However, the occasions when ecclesiastical authorities - Pope, Bishops, or Councils - have openly acknowledged the faults or abuses which they themselves were guilty of, have been quite rare.

 (Emphasis mine).  In fact, Memory and Reconciliation recounts only one such instance in all of the history of the Church: Pope Paul VI's request for pardon "of God...and of the separated brethren" of the East who may have felt offended "by us" (the Catholic Church) -- and even this request for pardon was not entirely unconditional; Pope Paul declared himself ready, for his part, to pardon the offenses of the Eastern churches against the Catholic Church.

In other words, Cardinal Ratzinger -- famously conservative "German Shepard of the Church" -- brought the Church, for the first time in its entire 2,000 year history, to an unconditional apology for the sins of its Magisterium.  He did it without damage to the consistency of the doctrine of the Church.  He did it in the face of nearly 2,000 years of denial and self-justification by some of the most powerful men on earth.  He did it by reasoning through some of the most contentious issues that any religion can face.    It was a stunning -- and a holy -- achievement.

Eighteen months later, Osama bin Laden mounts his appalling attack on civilians.  Muslims everywhere -- including members of Al Qaeda -- denounce the attack.  The vast majority of Muslims denounce the action because they believe that attacks against the innocent are absolutely irreconcilable with Islam.  Al Qaeda members and other radical Islamists object also -- not because the attacks cannot be justified at all, but simply because bin Laden failed to offer his victims the choice of conversion to Islam, which (in their view) was the only way that such killings could legitimately be thought of as part of a holy war, as distinct from plain old mass murder.  (This, by the way, is what is so ominous about the recent videotape of Adam Gadahn ("Azzam al Amriki," or "Azzam the American"), who clearly and unequivocably invites America to convert to Islam.  In doing so, he has fulfilled the requirement that bin Laden neglected in 2001, and -- to the extent Americans do not choose to convert -- clears the way for a fresh wave of  'justified' attacks.)  

So, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, finds himself grappling once again with the problem of violence enacted in the name of religion.

The Pope did not demand an apology from Muslims for the attacks of 9/11.  But he wants an engagement of the issue of religious violence that leads to a rejection of it.  The dilemma is -- how to engage the issue?  It was hard enough to grapple with the issue inside the Church; how, then, to engage the issue with another religion and be consistent with his understanding that God is perfect?  

The Pope would never equate Islam with the Catholic Church in perfection. (The theological basis for this is well beyond the scope of this diary, but basically, the idea is that while all religions have a share in the grace and knowledge of God, Catholicism has the most grace and knowledge. Every religion thinks this of itself; Catholics simply say so.)  The point is that the Pope has a deep appreciation for the fact that Allah, the God of Mohammed, is the same as the God of Abraham, Moses, and Christ.  

More than this, the Pope has a deep appreciation for the fact that the entire culture of Muslims is saturated in faith and devotion to God.   In that sense, Muslim society -- Muslim culture -- resembles the Church, or at least -- a church.  A community of people that follows God shares in the perfection of God.  And this is the heart of the dilemma of the Pope's speech at Regensberg.

Pope Benedict, with his enormous grasp of the history of the Church, went all the way back to the 12th century, to a conversation between a Christian and a Muslim, to raise the issue of violence in the supposed adherence to God.  The particular conversation was about the differences between Christianity and Islam, but Pope Benedict was interested in one aspect in particular.  In honing in on the part of the conversation dealing with violence, the Pope honed in on the very question with which he, as Cardinal, had previously grappled: can a religion steeped in God act wrongly?  

"God", [says the Christian emperor Manuel II Paleologus] "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 Pope told his audience at Regensberg that "the decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature."

Manuel II spoke from the prejudices of his time and from the limitations of his understanding when, in conversation with his Muslim companion, he said "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".  In quoting him, the Pope knew full well that this was a deeply flawed conversation; he characterized Manuel's speech as "startlingly brusque," which is just diplomacy-speak for "incredibly rude."  What is crucial to understand is that the Pope chose this conversation not because of Manuel's flawed and bigoted view of Islam, but precisely because --however flawed -- it was a conversation.  The Pope chose to comment on an ancient conversation between West and East precisely because the modern West, in his estimation, has lost the ability even to carry on this kind of conversation.  

The Cardinal Ratzinger who struggled mightily to help the Catholic Church come to terms with its violent past in 2000, now six years later wants to help the West talk about violence again.  And he finds that it is not the Muslims who cannot talk about it, but contemporary Western society that cannot talk about it.  Why not?  Because contemporary Western society cannot do what Muslim societies are able to do; contemporary Western culture cannot reconcile reason with faith.  The Pope's speech at Regensberg was an impassioned plea to the West to recover the union of reason and faith so as to be able to talk to cultures --such as Islam -- that unite reason with faith.  

Far from criticizing Muslims, at Regensberg Pope Benedict was aligning himself with them.  The money quote from the Pope's remarks at Regensberg is this:

And so I come to my conclusion.  This attempt ...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 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.

What is really unfortunate isn't that Pope Benedict reached back to a flawed and bigoted 12th century conversation in order to have a context for speaking about religious violence today.  What is unfortunate is that he had to.  For centuries, the West refused to talk to Islam at all, because we didn't share the same faith.  Now, we've lost even the ability to talk to Islam, and we've lost that ability because we don't share a belief in faith itself -- a belief that is central to Islamic culture.  Unless we reclaim the ability to talk about faith without sneering, we will insult Muslims at the very core of their culture, at the very core of their existence.  In that state of insult, there can be no peace.  

What Pope Benedict is saying, is this: It is the insistence that faith has no part in a modern and rational world, that is the hobgoblin of little minds.
P.S. I edited the diary to provide a link to the entire Regensberg speech. Please ...take the time to read it!

•  Kiss of peace?

  If this diary makes sense to you, and if you can post it somewhere where people (particularly Muslims) will see it, would you do that?  I hate this lack of peace.

  by 4thepeople on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 05:46:19 AM PDT

  •  Thanks! this is the first explanation

    of what Benedict XVI said that makes sense.  As a life-long member of the curia and someone who reveres John Paul II, it was hard to believe that he could make such a foolish statement as the MSM has reported.

    Thanks for putting it in context.

    by mkfarkus on Tue Sep 19, 2006 at 07:25:46 AM PDT

•  Bravo!

  Much needed perspective, eloquently expressed.

  by melvin on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 05:46:33 AM PDT

  •  Thanks, Melvin!

    I'm so relieved that you understood!  This terrible misunderstanding is really breaking my heart.  

    by 4thepeople on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 05:49:54 AM PDT

•  Ratzinger is in a tough spot.

  If he wants to create an open conversation, he runs up against a basic principle:

  A store cannot sell what it does not stock.

  I can see that he may feel the situation is too urgent for his church to take the time to stock up on tolerance, understanding, faith, empathy, all the things he will need to bring to bear even to begin this dialogue or conversation. But that is in itself a symptom of a lack of faith, a conviction that God is incapable of managing the world while he acquires the necessary traits to conduct this project of peace.

  Stock. Then sell.

  by khereva on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 05:57:00 AM PDT

  •  Doesn't that describe all of us?

    None of us has what we need -- or I should say, none of us is what s/he should be.  But perfection isn't required.  What the Pope criticizes isn't the West's lack of perfection, it's the West's lack of willingness. And nothing stocks the shelves like willingness.

    by 4thepeople on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 06:05:04 AM PDT

•  Great article

  I recognised my own internal hobgoblin in there.  I am a long since lapsed catholic, but I was still fascinated by the history of apology and the proper context of the Pontiff's remarks.  However, I still think he should have been more careful...

  by letsgetreal on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 06:05:04 AM PDT

  •  He might have done better to...

    Pope Benedict might have done better to have edited out the part about "evil into the world," which is the only offensive part of his entire speech. But I think we have to recognize how radical this speech really was.  None of the Western leaders except the Pope, has shown the least bit of interest in exploring the Muslim point of view without demonizing them.

    by 4thepeople on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 06:11:07 AM PDT

    •  Why?

      What I think the point he was getting across was is that due to extremist violence, that was the PERCEPTION of Muslims by that writer in the 14th century...just as, due to increasing violence, it's becoming the widespread perception of Muslims today.

      And Muslims, um, well...reacting with violence, like shooting an elderly nun in the back and calling for "anyone who insults Mohammed to be killed on the spot", didn't help.

      by Loboguara on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 07:06:25 AM PDT

      •  Um, it wasn't just perception

        Manuel Paleologos ruled over a Christian empire under violent physical attack from the Muslim Turks, to whom it would eventually fall, only to have its institutions eradicated and its churches turned to mosques, all by force. The days of Moorish Spain, with its famous tolerance of three religions, were already past. This makes the emperor's own attempts at dialogue remarkable in themselves.

        Now, of course, we have a dead nun and burned churches expressing Muslim outrage at being called violent. Irony doesn't even cover it. And all in reaction to a very academic lecture, apparently upholding the principle that all discussions in the West must first submit their texts to an imam for approval.

        I think the most interesting part of the story here has not been covered. Who decided to make this an issue? Who broadcast this to the street with manufactured rage? I doubt many people in the Middle East closely follow l'Osservatore Romano in their spare time. In this case, the spread of the story is the much bigger story.

        by Smallbottle on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 09:00:57 PM PDT

        •  As was the case with the Danish

          cartoons, which clearly never were intended for other than a Danish market.  They were supplemented, printed and spread in a forty-some page booklet in the Middle East.  "Broadcast to the street with manufactured rage," as you put it.

          by DSPS owl on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 10:19:39 PM PDT

        •  That is a good point.

          It's rather like someone went and dug up something small, harmless and obscure, doused with gasoline, lit it and threw it in the street and declared it dangerously flammable.

          by Loboguara on Tue Sep 19, 2006 at 06:21:06 AM PDT

        •  I third the motion: that IS a great question

          There are always plenty of ignorant sheeple, here or there, to get whipped up with pathetic ease and predictability during the "two minutes Hate".

          By far the more signficant question is, who produces and orchestrates the Hate session?

          by lgmcp on Tue Sep 19, 2006 at 04:43:28 PM PDT

•  4thepeople

  this is by far the best writing ive seen on this situation yet.  im having difficulty expressing my gratitude for the knowledge, humility, and perspective you've brought to such a difficult topic.  it gives me hope for that dialouge, which is something i have been lacking since this story broke.  

  thank you.

  by elie on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 06:20:33 AM PDT

  •  I tipped you, elie, but it feels funny to do so.

    It feels funny to tip you for such a compliment -- take it as it was intended, as a thank you for putting your heart into the reading of this diary. Thanks.

    by 4thepeople on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 06:28:06 AM PDT

•  Awesome diary.

  You should cross-post it on Street Prophets, the religion site of Daily Kos.  I'll put a link up on one of the open threads.  This is great.

  by dirkster42 on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 06:53:13 AM PDT

  •  dirkster...could you help?

    I'd really like this to be on Street Prophets, but I only joined last night (in anticipation of posting this very diary)... so of course, I can't even post comments for 24 hours, and no diaries.  Can you copy this diary and post it in your spot? (Bonus for posting on SP: All mojos to you; Penalty: all flames to you, too!) Thanks for considering it.

    by 4thepeople on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 07:31:06 AM PDT

    •  I think there's enough here

      that it will be timely even in a few days.  I'll post a link on coffee hour, and then you can re-post and get all the mojo over on SP when the privileges open up.  

      by dirkster42 on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 09:30:35 AM PDT

    •  I'll second dirkster

      Thanks for this insightful and careful diary.  Heartily rec'd.

      Please do post this on Street Prophets once your "probation period" (rather monastic-sounding, isn't it?) is over.  Things move at a much slower pace over there, so waiting a few days won't be a problem.  And I'm one of the frontpagers, so I'll do my part to make sure it's seen.

      by Mahanoy on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 08:22:23 PM PDT

•  What a thoughtful diary on this.

  First, I had no idea that Cardinal Ratzinger played such a role in Pope John Paul II's various apologies.  I have to admit, I am surprised by this.  Maybe I don't know the Church as well as I think I do.

  This really changes my reaction to his statement.  Though I had actually read enough of the speech to know that he was calling for greater understanding and cooperation, I had taken this sentence to be a backhanded insult, a way of saying Muslims are evil while pretending it was someone else who said it.

  Thank you for such a detailed and thoughtful analysis.  I hope it is widely read.

  by gpm on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 01:22:17 PM PDT

  •  New coverage is so misleading

    I was out of town for a few days, and came back to see footage this morning of violent outrage in Muslim countries.  Hearing the Pope's quote out of context, I assumed that his intent WAS inflammatory and the Muslim reaction somewhat understandable.

    Now that I have more context, I am deeply disappointed both in the news coverage and in the extremism of the reaction.

    by lgmcp on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 02:34:15 PM PDT

    •  I agree

      This explanation makes it much more clear what was really being said.  Frankly I did assume based on what I've heard about this pope that the out-of-context comment was expressive of his intention.

      by fotyc on Tue Sep 19, 2006 at 07:04:35 AM PDT

•  Uhoh, link broken

  to the Regensberg speech.  Looks like the BBC took it down?

  by lgmcp on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 02:48:01 PM PDT

  •  Full text of Regensberg speech

    I'm afraid the BBC may have taken the speech down because maybe it's being regarded by them as too inflammatory.  Here is the full text:

    APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI TO MÜNCHEN, ALTÖTTING AND REGENSBURG (SEPTEMBER 9-14, 2006)
    MEETING WITH THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SCIENCE
    LECTURE OF THE HOLY FATHER
    Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg Tuesday, 12 September 2006

    Faith, Reason and the University Memories and Reflections

    Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,
    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 (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 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 Qur'an, 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 Qur'an. 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 (*4V8,>4H - 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 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 addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness 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 (F×<8`(T) 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...".</p>

    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.

    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, F×<8`(T, 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.  [Joan: Why "intrinsic?"   The Pope says, in essence, that God willed a specifically Greek understanding/interpretation of biblical faith, as though this is something that must happen 'in the fullness of time.'  Was John the Evangelist before or after Paul?]</p>

    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.  [Catholic exegesis depends so much on 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.  [Ordained will? i.e., God's will as it is understood by those ordained to know the ordained?]  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 - 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.  [If infinitely greater unlikeness, then why: "we are made in the image and likeness of God?  Why not: "we are made infinitely unlike God?  Surely this is not  a mere matter of emphasis, but of something truly weighty, in the divine aspect of creation, about likeness rather than unlikeness.]  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 - "8@(46¬ 8"JD,\"", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

    This inner rapprochement  [what, exactly, does the Pope mean by "rapprochement?"  And isn't there a tautology at the heart of  this? i.e., it happened, therefore God intended it to happen?]  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.  [But: is not the European character of Christianity itself the result of extreme and coercive violence?] 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.  [Hunh? Is this true?]  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.  [i.e., the Reformers were seeking an aboriginal understanding of God by looking to pre-philosophical, solely scriptural, renditions.  The question is, why were they doing this?  They weren't doing this in a vacuum; they were seeking to correct some perceived distortion.  Seems to me you have at least to mention the perceived distortions themselves, to see whether dehellenization might make some sense or have some basis -- to see whether this, too, was a thing intended by God 'in the fullness of time.']  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.  [What is the difference between 'practical reason' and 'reason?']

    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 [Did he deny Jesus' divinity?] 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.  [Does this mean Harnack did not see himself as such, but was seen as such  by others who wound up having the last word?] 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 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.
    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 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 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.
    © Copyright 2006 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

    by 4thepeople on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 06:14:20 PM PDT

    •  Here It Is Without the Comments

      Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

      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 (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 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 Qur'an, 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 Qur'an. 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 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 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 addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness 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 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.

      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 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 - 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 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.

      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 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 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.

      [I've removed comments in brackets and reference codes with blots and fumbles. I apologize in advance for any errors.]

      Think, liberally.

      by Liberal Thinking on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 09:58:40 PM PDT

      •  Not to be flip, but....

        I think that Boy George and culture club summed it uop nearly 20 years ago.

        "Love is hard to find"
        "In the church of the poison mind."

        Nice writing.  Lots of it too!

        by boilerman10 on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 10:47:27 PM PDT

        •  I Hope It Is Clear That This Is the Pope's Speech

          Not my writing. I just took the previous comment and removed the extraneous text from it that was commentary on his speech. I think that got in by accident when 4thepeople made his copy.

          I'm sorry if that wasn't clear!

          Think, liberally.

          by Liberal Thinking on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 11:05:31 PM PDT

          •  Yes it is.

            Thank you for posting it up.

            I did read it.

            But, and I don't know why, but near the end of reading the speech, the old Culture Club song just sort of popped up.

            I find the timing of the speech, so close to the German State elections suspicious.  The idea that Bennie the Pope "didn't know" about the resurgent NDP is not acceptable to me.

            We haver a Pope siding apparently with the way out German right, alienating truly moderate Turkish Muslim leaders as well, and playing into bin Laden's hands, all at the same time.

            Smooth move, Bennie!

            by boilerman10 on Tue Sep 19, 2006 at 03:14:24 AM PDT

            •  haver?

              forgive me, it is early here.  Have.

              by boilerman10 on Tue Sep 19, 2006 at 03:15:42 AM PDT

      •  Here is an html link to it

        Zenit News agencyfull English text in html.

        BTW there is an interesting discussion of this by Juan Cole an American professor and Arabist who is much read by the liberal side of world.  He describes the point the Pope was trying to make in this way

        Benedict was trying to stake out a position that Western godless atheism is actually unreasonable, and that hard line coercive religion that disregards reason is wrong (he incorrectly identified this position as that of Muhammad and the Quran). Thus, the Catholic Church, with its reasoned faith, becomes the ideal, avoiding the errors of the two extremes (Western secularism and Islam). To accomplish this positioning, Benedict XVI had to reduce to cardboard figures all three traditions-- Western rationalism, Roman Catholicism, and Islam.
        
        Christianity hasn't always stood for sweet reasonableness and the harmony of faith and science and the primacy of the individual conscience. One of the reasons we know so little about Mayan history is that Catholic authorities had Mayan papyrus rolls, which contained extensive hieroglyphic records, burned as works of the devil. It wasn't as if the Mayans were given a choice about remaining pagan or converting to Christianity. And there was the forcible conversion to Christianity of large numbers of Muslims and Jews in Spain after the Reconquista from 1492.
        
        Nor have all Christian theological streams concluded that human reason can comprehend God's reason.
        
        There have been times and places where Islam was more tolerant than Christianity. And significant Muslim theological traditions, though not the majority, have held a vision of God as in accord with human reason very similar to the one embraced by the Pope. Look at the Mu'tazili school, which has been extremely influential in Shiite Islam, and which has been favored by modernist reformers such as the Egyptian Muhammad `Abduh (d. 1905).
        
        The problem with the Pope's Regensburg lecture is that it laid out three intellectual traditions as unchanging, undifferentiated essences and then contrasted them with one another, to the edification of his own position. There aren't any essences.
        
        It is always better to put forward the virtues of your tradition on their own, without attempting invidious comparisons with, and put-downs, of others. If Christianity is superior, that can be perceived without it being necessary to brand Islam inferior.
        
        Religious traditions are complex and multiple and often self-contradictory. Trying to play politics with them by putting down the founder of a religion with false accusations will always cause trouble, of course. But what is worse is that the allegation causing the trouble is simply inaccurate.

        by Fred in Vermont on Tue Sep 19, 2006 at 06:00:49 AM PDT

        •  Thanks, Fred... and man

          ...oh man is Juan Cole a better writer and scholar than I am!

          by 4thepeople on Tue Sep 19, 2006 at 08:09:31 AM PDT

    •  A highly educated speech.

      I did not know the Pope was an academic, though, it should be no surprise. Now, as a representative of religion, of course it is his position to defend the role of faith. Presenting his case as a call toward expanding our academic boundaries is certainly a deft move by the Pope, and I really think that this, not even dialogue between Muslim and Western cultures, is the real heart of the speech.

      In reality, Muslims and Westerners and East Asians and Africans and everyone we live in the same world. We face the same issues. If we confront the human phenomenon of religion through the use of reason, it ought not be out of a desire not to offend the "convictions" of Islamic culture or to enter into a dialogue to further political relations between cultures, for these are different motives which can cloud the issues that the Pope is discussing, but because the human condition itself demands it.

      The exploration of faith through reason, of course, or a rational basis for faith, as the Pope himself implied in his citations, has been going on for thousands of years. It certainly ought to have a place in universities, as ought sociology, and philosophy, and English studies departments. And I believe this should be the case even though, a degree in any one of those things will not very likely make you a million bucks.

      by Beet on Tue Sep 19, 2006 at 12:53:03 AM PDT

•  But wait

  You say in your article:

  It doesn't really matter whether you believe the Catholic Church is the Body of Christ, or not.  What matters is that you take very seriously the fact that a billion people do believe it, and over its 2,000-year history, another billion or so people have believed it.  What matters is that this belief has been held ever since Paul first taught it to the church at Corinth.  What matters is that the belief has been consistent

  The Church, the Pope, the priests, and the people have obeyed Church teaching regarding the Church as the Body of Christ in widely varying and inconsistent ways, even while burning Jews alive, exorcizing those possessed by the devil, and conducting mass murder in the name of the Faith (read Crusades), to mention only a few despicable actions. The Church has evolved this dogma over time. It has been far from consistent.

  The trouble with the Body of Christ idea is that its meaning has always been interpreted by humans. Over a 2000 year time span, humans learn new things. It does little good to Galileo that the Church came to see the error, the inconsistency, if you will, of its teaching.

  Today, the people are way ahead of the Church, the Pope, and the priests. Some of them align themselves with conservative dogma, but most ignore it, go to church on Sunday-or not-, practice birth control, get abortions, get divorced, etc. Many leave the Church, but a great many more consider themselves Catholic and follow their conscience as they have been taught to do.

  by Miss Pip on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 03:29:55 PM PDT

  •  Please, don't misunderstand, Miss Pip...

    I certainly don't mean that a couple of billion Catholics have, at all times and in all ages, understood the concept of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ in exactly the same way, with exactly the same nuance, with exactly the same conviction or commitment.  But the essential understanding has, indeed, been consistent.  Whether by conservatives, or by ultra-liberals like myself, Catholics since Paul addressed the church at Corinth have understood that the whole people of God -- both living and dead -- (which is everybody who ever was and ever will be) -- are connected to one another, bound to one another in and with and through Christ, and that the Church is the earthly embodiment of that union.  

    You are not going to get any argument from me that anti-Semitism, the Crusades, witch-burnings, torture, coerced conversions, and the like, are  despicable.  What you will get from me is a deep appreciation for the breakthroughs of Pope John Paul's papacy in publically acknowledging these realities, and for Cardinal Ratzinger's role in facilitating those breakthroughs.  

    I can only hope that you've taken the larger point of my diary, which is that the Pope's speech at Regensberg was not an insult to Muslims at all.  Rather, it was a plea to the West to talk to Islam.  It was a plea to the West to redefine 'reason' such  that reason includes matters of faith, in a way that permits dialogue with cultures that -- unlike Western cultures -- are profoundly religious... cultures with whom we must ... we must begin to talk.

    I sense a great deal of pain behind your comment.  Perhaps it has been at the hands of the Church.  If so ...been there -- am there.  But the Divine Physician does not insist that there is only one hospital in which we can be healed; he will heal us, wherever we are, if we are open to it.

    by 4thepeople on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 06:05:04 PM PDT

•  asdf

  John (a white male and not a racist) makes a speech about racial inequality. His target audience, for the most part, is the white community. John touches on the perception the white community shies away from racial inequality discussions and issues, while those in the black community are willing and ready and do so often. John also points out that when the white community discuss this issue, it's usually in a dismissive, insulting manner.

  So to get the ball rolling, he quotes David Duke remarks in regards to Duke's belief that Blacks are inferior to Whites.

  John's point was to illustrate how absence of discussion in regards to racial inequality may result in creating bigots like David Duke.  John's point was that such sentiments from Duke was the level of discussion to be had between Blacks and Whites in history.

  But here's the catch:  John failed to state this explicitly in his speech and he described Duke's words only as 'strongly brusque'.

  Now my questions are these:

  Why didn't John make his point clearer than this? And if he was misunderstood (as he surely would be), why didn't John make this clear as soon as he knew that he'd been misunderstood?

  You do not lecture about racial inequality and quote from a bigot unless you're prepared to immediately condemn it in the same speech and in no uncertain terms or during an immediate followup.

  But John didn't do this. It will not matter that John is a good person. It will not matter that his heart is in the right place. It won't matter about his membership in the NAACP. It won't even matter if was civil right's activist. It will not matter if his two ex-wives and current wife were the color of night, John will be blasted by not only those in the black community, but by those in his target audience, the white community. Those in the black community were already wary of John because he's white. Considering the history, it's justified. Therefore John should have made it absolutely clear, from the beginning, he meant no harm or he should have never used Duke to make his point in the first place.

  Farrakhan did something similar. He made derogatory statements against Jews. Later, much, much later, he claimed he meant something else. Too late. I stopped listening to Farrakhan after that. To this day, I can't remember what he was talking about during that sermon except for that statement. (I'm not saying Ratzinger is like Farrakhan. I'm only focusing on the power and effects of words.)

  You may not have anything against Muslims and Islam but there are plenty who do. They have used Ratzinger's quote to justify themselves in their biasness. I not only worry about extremists who've become violent b/c of this incident but I'm also concerned about those who would use this one unneccassary quote to paint a broad brush on all Muslims.

  I have nothing against the Church or any religion. And this will be the third or fourth time that I read Ratzinger's speech.  My conclusion remains the same...Ratzinger fumbled...

  I may read it a fifth time, but you have to admit that if you have to read this more than twice to get what Ratzinger meant, then he may not have been as clear as he could have been.

  by callmecassandra on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 07:22:57 PM PDT

  •  exactly right

    You have hit the nail directly on the head.  But allow me to add one observation: The Pope describes the author of the offending remarks as "the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus".  Suppose, in your David Duke analogy, John had referred to Duke as "erudite".  Future protests of innocence would be absurd.

    Was the Pope unaware of the Muslim reaction to some cartoons of Mohammed?  Did he suppose that quoting an erudite Byzantine emperor would find a happier response?  That seems most unreasonable.

    by fmrgop on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 08:37:52 PM PDT

    •  Good catch!

      And why was the quote needed at all? I read the speech sans quote and it was just fine and was actually good.

      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 (σὺν λόγω) 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...".

      Take out the bolded and the speech loses nothing in impact. Leave it in and it weakens the point and you lose the target audience. And really, it just seems so...out of place.

      by callmecassandra on Mon Sep 18, 2006 at 09:10:53 PM PDT

      •  So, in an academic lecture

        the lecturer must be careful to hide politically incorrect facts from his students, to rewrite history so it fits modern agendas, and to present a sort of "Path to 1391" instead of actual historical texts?

        I imagine that today, in universities across the West, lecturers in European history will be explicitly repeating the Reformers' references to the Pope as the Antichrist without fear that their Catholic students will burn down the library. And that is as it should be.

        by Smallbottle on Tue Sep 19, 2006 at 05:37:46 AM PDT

        •  No.

          But if you actually want someone to take something positive from that lecture (and in my case, take you sincerely), whether the target is the audience or the students, I would suggest excising unnecessary quotes. It was not necessary to include this quote to make the point that spreading religion through violence is wrong and is considered wrong by both early Christians and Muslism.

          This one,

          "There is no compulsion in religion".

          and this one,

          sprea