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.[1] 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.[2] 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 (διάλεξις - 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 some of the experts, this is probably 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, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, 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.”[3]
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 (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...".[4]
The decisive
statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance
with reason is contrary to God's nature.[5] 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.[6] Here Khoury quotes a work
of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm 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.[7]
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 λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν
λόγω, 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
asserts being, "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which
Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy.[8] 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.[9] 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 Hazm 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 - "λογικη λατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and
with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).[10]
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.[11]
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,[12] 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 decisive 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 an initial 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 simply false, but 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 falsifiable, 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".[13] 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.
[1]
Of the total number of 26 conversations (διάλεξις – Khoury translates this as “controversy”)
in the dialogue (“Entretien”), T. Khoury published the 7th “controversy” with footnotes
and an extensive introduction on the origin of the text, on the manuscript tradition
and on the structure of the dialogue, together with brief summaries of the “controversies”
not included in the edition; the Greek text is accompanied by a French translation:
“Manuel II Paléologue, Entretiens avec un Musulman. 7e Controverse”, Sources Chrétiennes
n. 115, Paris 1966. In the meantime, Karl Förstel published in Corpus Islamico-Christianum
(Series Graeca ed. A. T. Khoury and R. Glei) an edition of the text in Greek and
German with commentary: “Manuel II. Palaiologus, Dialoge mit einem Muslim”, 3 vols.,
Würzburg-Altenberge 1993-1996. As early as 1966, E. Trapp had published the Greek
text with an introduction as vol. II of Wiener byzantinische Studien. I shall be
quoting from Khoury’s edition.
[2] On the origin and redaction of the dialogue,
cf. Khoury, pp. 22-29; extensive comments in this regard can also be found in the
editions of Förstel and Trapp.
[3] Controversy VII, 2 c: Khoury, pp. 142-143;
Förstel, vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.5, pp. 240-241. In the Muslim world, this quotation
has unfortunately been taken as an expression of my personal position, thus arousing
understandable indignation. I hope that the reader of my text can see immediately
that this sentence does not express my personal view of the Qur’an, for which I have
the respect due to the holy book of a great religion. In quoting the text of the
Emperor Manuel II, I intended solely to draw out the essential relationship between
faith and reason. On this point I am in agreement with Manuel II, but without endorsing
his polemic.
[4] Controversy VII, 3 b–c: Khoury, pp. 144-145; Förstel vol.
I, VII. Dialog 1.6, pp. 240-243.
[5] It was purely for the sake of this statement
that I quoted the dialogue between Manuel and his Persian interlocutor. In this statement
the theme of my subsequent reflections emerges.
[6] Cf. Khoury, p. 144, n.
1.
[7] R. Arnaldez, Grammaire et théologie chez Ibn Hazm de Cordoue, Paris
1956, p. 13; cf. Khoury, p. 144. The fact that comparable positions exist in the
theology of the late Middle Ages will appear later in my discourse.
[8] Regarding
the widely discussed interpretation of the episode of the burning bush, I refer to
my book Introduction to Christianity, London 1969, pp. 77-93 (originally published
in German as Einführung in das Christentum, Munich 1968; N.B. the pages quoted refer
to the entire chapter entitled “The Biblical Belief in God”). I think that my statements
in that book, despite later developments in the discussion, remain valid today.
[9]
Cf. A. Schenker, “L’Écriture sainte subsiste en plusieurs formes canoniques simultanées”,
in L’Interpretazione della Bibbia nella Chiesa. Atti del Simposio promosso dalla
Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, Vatican City 2001, pp. 178-186.
[10]
On this matter I expressed myself in greater detail in my book The Spirit of the Liturgy,
San Francisco 2000, pp. 44-50.
[11] Of the vast literature on the theme of
dehellenization, I would like to mention above all: A. Grillmeier, “Hellenisierung-Judaisierung
des Christentums als Deuteprinzipien der Geschichte des kirchlichen Dogmas”, in idem,
Mit ihm und in ihm. Christologische Forschungen und Perspektiven, Freiburg 1975,
pp. 423-488.
[12] Newly published with commentary by Heino Sonnemans (ed.):
Joseph Ratzinger-Benedikt XVI, Der Gott des Glaubens und der Gott der Philosophen.
Ein Beitrag zum Problem der theologia naturalis, Johannes-Verlag Leutesdorf, 2nd revised
edition, 2005.
[13] Cf. 90 c-d. For this text, cf. also R. Guardini, Der
Tod des Sokrates, 5th edition, Mainz-Paderborn 1987, pp. 218-221.