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09/21/2006
In Hot Water
In light of the controversy over Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks the
other day, I thought I would provide some extensive excerpts, in
an attempt to place the Pope’s comments in proper context. The
key passage drawing all the attention in the Muslim world is
contained in the third paragraph.
Pope Benedict XVI, Lecture at the University of Regensburg
September 12, 2006
“Faith, Reason and the University”
[Excerpts]
The university was (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 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 structure 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 Word.” 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 .
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 .
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 – 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 of 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,
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.
[Source: The Vatican]
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I’ve changed my schedule around a little. Next Hott Spotts
Oct. 5.
Brian Trumbore
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