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*Faith, reason and the university: memories and reflections*

Following is the speech given by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of

Regensburg in Germany on September 12

*Friday September 15, 2006*

*Guardian Unlimited*

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 [text unclear] 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 practise idolatry.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete

practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable

dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's

nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?

I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is

Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of

faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the

first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel

with the words: "In the beginning was the Word".

This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, [text unclear] 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 [text unclear] 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.

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