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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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