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Pope’s speech at University of Regensburg (full text) 
Sep. 20
(CWNews.com)
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Editor’s note: The following is the prepared text from which Pope Benedict XVI (bio - news)
spoke as he addressed an academic audience at the Unviersity of
Regensburg on September 12. As he actually delivered it, the speech
differed slightly. Because the speech has aroused an unusual amount of
debate– particularly regarding the Pope’s references to Islam and to
religious violence– CWN strongly recommends reading the entire text.
For follow-up stories and analysis see the CWN home page.
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,
It
is a moving experience for me to stand and give a lecture at this
university podium once again. I think back to those years when, after a
pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the
University of Bonn. This 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: the reality 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 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 (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 probably 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 the responses of the learned
Persian.
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 of
the three Laws: the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur’an.
In this lecture I would like to discuss only one point– itself rather
marginal to the dialogue itself– 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 jihad (holy war). The emperor must have
known that surah 2, 256 reads: There is no compulsion in religion. It 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 turns to his interlocutor somewhat
brusquely with the central question on the relationship between
religion and violence in general, in these words:
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 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
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.
As
far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion
is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays
challenges us directly. 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, 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
declares simply that he is, is already presents a challenge to the
notion of myth, to which Socrates’s 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
perhaps 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 ultimately 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 unlikeness remains
infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing
analogy and its language (cf. Lateran IV). 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 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 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 program
of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct
from one another in their motivations and objectives.
Dehellenization
first emerges in connection with the fundamental postulates of the
Reformation in the 16th 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 program 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 19th and 20th 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 program 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. I
will not 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 favor of morality. In the end he was
presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. The
fundamental 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 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.
We
shall 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: 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” 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 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 the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such,
it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of
Christianity. 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 program with which a theology grounded in
Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act
reasonably (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.
