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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.
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