Provisional Text Lecture at the Meeting with Representatives of the Sciences 12
September, 2006
Lecture of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI at the Meeting with the Representatives
of Science (Tuesday, 12 September 2006, Regensburg, University)
Faith,
Reason and the University Memories and Reflections
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 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 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 (διάλεξις - controversy) 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 threaten.
But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded
in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without decending 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 (σὺν
λόγω) 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.
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 λόγoς. 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 λογικὴ λατρεία - 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 fundamental 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. 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 favour 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 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 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 programme 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.
NOTE:
The Holy Father intends to supply a subsequent version of this text, complete
with footnotes. The present text must therefore be considered provisional