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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...".
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 8`(@H". 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.
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 -
"8@(46¬ 8"JD,\"", 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.
***
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
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