Holy Father Pope Benedictus XVI in his own words

[Guest guest]

"Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment

accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he

addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the

central question about the relationship between religion and

violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought

that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman,

such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".

The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on

to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through

violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with

the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is

not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably 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."

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has defended Pope Benedict XVI

against allegations that he had attacked Islam, saying critics had

misunderstood comments the Pope made this week during a visit to his

native Germany."Whoever criticises the Pope misunderstood the aim of

his speech. It was an invitation to dialogue between religions and

the Pope expressedly spoke in favour of this dialogue, which is

something I also support and consider urgent and necessary," Merkel

was quoted as saying by German newspaper Bild on Friday."What

Benedict XVI emphasised was a decisive and uncompromising

renunciation of all forms of violence in the name of religion,"

Merkel was quoted as saying in an article to appear on Saturday.

 

Holy Father Pope Benedictus XVI

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Faith, Reason and the University

Memories and Reflections

 

Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies,

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

 

It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university

and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think

back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger

Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn. That was in

1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary

professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor

secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with

students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would

meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff.

There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers,

philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties.

Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from

every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university,

making possible a genuine experience of universitas - something that

you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned - the experience, in

other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at

times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a

whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality

with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right

use of reason - this reality became a lived experience. The

university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It

was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they

too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of

the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the

faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole.

This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was

not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had

said there was something odd about our university: it had two

faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in

the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and

reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason,

and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith:

this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without

question.

 

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by

Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried

on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the

erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated

Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of

both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this

dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402;

and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail

than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely

over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the

Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while

necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as

they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old

Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention

to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like

to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue

as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and

reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-

point for my reflections on this issue.

 

In the seventh conversation (*4V8,>4H - controversy) edited by

Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war.

The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no

compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of

the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and

under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions,

developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war.

Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment

accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he

addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the

central question about the relationship between religion and

violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought

that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman,

such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".

The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on

to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through

violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with

the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is

not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably (F×< 8`(T) is

contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body.

Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well

and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince

a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any

kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".

 

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion

is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's

nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a

Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-

evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent.

His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of

rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist

R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state

that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would

oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would

even have to practise idolatry.

 

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete

practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable

dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts

God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically

true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between

what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical

understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book

of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the

prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the 8`

(oH". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, F×< 8`(T,

with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is

creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason.

John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and

in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical

faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the

logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter

between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by

chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred

and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to

Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be

interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a

rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

 

In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some

time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a

name which separates this God from all other divinities with their

many names and simply declares "I am", already presents a challenge

to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and

transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament,

the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity

at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now

deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of

heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the

words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of

God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark

expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human

hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those

Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the

customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the

Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep

level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the

later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of

the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more

than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory)

translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness

and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one

which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for

the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith

and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine

enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith

and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to

faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is

contrary to God's nature.

 

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we

find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between

the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-

called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with

Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to

the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this

is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done

the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to

positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even

lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to

truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted

that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an

authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain

eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As

opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that

between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our

created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth

Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely

greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy

and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him

away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly

divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as

logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf.

Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is

thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph

3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos.

Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "8@(46¬

8"JD,\"", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our

reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

 

This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek

philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only

from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that

of world history - it is an event which concerns us even today.

Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity,

despite its origins and some significant developments in the East,

finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We

can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with

the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and

remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.

 

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an

integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for

a dehellenization of Christianity - a call which has more and more

dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern

age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the

programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are

clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and

objectives.

 

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of

the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition

of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted

with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to

say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of

thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living

historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical

system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought

faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the

biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from

another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to

become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to

set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this

programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never

have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical

reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

 

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with

Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a

student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was

highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of

departure Pascal's distinction between the God of the philosophers

and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at

Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue, and I do not intend to

repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to

describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of

dehellenization. Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the

man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of

theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen

as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus

was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the

end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message.

Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into

harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from

seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in

Christ's divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-

critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to

theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is

something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific.

What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an

expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its

rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the

modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in

Kant's "Critiques", but in the meantime further radicalized by the

impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is

based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism

(Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success

of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical

structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it

possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this

basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern

understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature's

capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the

possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation

can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can,

depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As

strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a

convinced Platonist/Cartesian.

 

This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we

have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the

interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered

scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured

against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history,

psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves

to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important

for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes

the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-

scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of

the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

 

I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be

observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain

theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing

Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say

more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man

himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human

questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by

religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of

collective reason as defined by "science", so understood, and must

thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then

decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable

in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the

sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and

religion lose their power to create a community and become a

completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for

humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and

reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that

questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to

construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology

and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

 

Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I

must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is

now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural

pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with

Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary

inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The

latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of

the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to

inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is

not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New

Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek

spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament

developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early

Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures.

Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship

between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith

itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith

itself.

 

And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad

strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to

do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment

and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects

of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all

grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for

mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to

us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is – as you yourself mentioned,

Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as

such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential

decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of

retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of

reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new

possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from

these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome

them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come

together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of

reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose

its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the

university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not

merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but

precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

 

Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures

and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is

widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of

philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's

profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from

the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound

convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which

relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of

entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have

attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically

Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond

itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern

scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure

of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the

prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its

methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so

is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural

sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and

theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for

theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the

religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith

in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be

an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I

am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier

conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised,

and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone

became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of

his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this

way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer

a great loss". The West has long been endangered by this aversion to

the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer

great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of

reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the programme

with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the

debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos,

is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his

Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian

interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason,

that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To

rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

 

Note: The Holy Father intends to supply a subsequent version of this

text, complete with footnotes. The present text must therefore be

considered provisional.

 

[01245-02.02] [Original text: German]

 

 

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ!

 

We are gathered, Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Protestants, -

and together with us there are also some Jewish friends – we are

gathered to sing together the evening praise of God. At the heart of

this liturgy are the Psalms, in which the Old and the New Covenant

come together and our prayer is joined to the Israel which believes

and lives in hope. This is an hour of gratitude for the fact that we

thus recite together the Psalms, and, by turning to the Lord, at the

same time grow in unity among ourselves.

 

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20INGLESE

 

 

Experts: Pope seeks role in Islam debate By BRIAN MURPHY, AP

Religion Writer

1 hour, 56 minutes ago

 

 

 

Pope Benedict XVI's comments on religious radicalism are

another sign of his intention to bring his voice into one of the

world's most critical showdowns: Islam's internal struggles between

moderates and extremists.

 

The remarks — tucked into an address at a German university where he

formerly taught theology — were interpreted by many experts in

interfaith relations as a signal that the Vatican is staking

a new and more demanding stance for its dealings with the Muslim

world.

 

Benedict, they say, appears to increasingly view the West's

confrontation with radical Islam as a fateful moment in history that

demands the Vatican's moral authority — just as his predecessor,

John Paul II, reshaped the dimensions of the papacy by openly taking

sides in the Cold War.

 

The risk for the Vatican is whether it will be perceived in the

Muslim world as part of a broader Western cultural and political

campaign against Islam.

 

"We have seen a hard line from this pope," said Ali El-Samman,

president of the interfaith committee for Egypt's High Islamic

Council. "It's a disappointment for many Muslims. But just because

we are disappointed in a pope doesn't mean we are against all

Christians."

 

The Vatican said Benedict did not intend the remarks to be offensive

and sought to draw attention to the incompatibility of faith and

violence.

 

The pope quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th-

century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and a

Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam.

 

"The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," the

pope said. "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad 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.'"

 

Benedict, who is supposed to visit Turkey this fall in his first

trip to a Muslim nation, did not explicitly agree with the words nor

did he repudiate them.

 

In the backlash, some of the more subtle — yet potentially far-

reaching — references have been overshadowed.

 

The speech suggested deep dismay over the current conditions of

Christians in the Middle East and the rest of the Muslim world, said

John Voll, director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding

at Georgetown University in Washington.

 

"This reflects the intention of Pope Benedict to distinguish

himself from his predecessor on his approach to interfaith

dialogue," said Voll. "And by this, it means more reciprocity."

 

Voll said the pope may increasingly instruct Vatican envoys to

stress issues of forced conversions of Christians and limits on

Christian rights and worship.

 

"It's the next step after John Paul began opening doors" with

historic pilgrimages to Muslim nations, including a visit to a

Syrian mosque in 2001, Voll said.

 

As John Paul's chief watchdog on Roman Catholic doctrine, Benedict —

then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — had little role in shaping

the Vatican's contact with Islam and other faiths.

 

Some experts say Benedit's theological scholarship gives him an

affinity for Orthodox churches and Judaism because of many shared

traditions and holy texts, but leaves him less equipped to deal with

Islam at a time when suspicions dominate relations between the West

and Muslim world.

 

The speech, some say, shows the pontiff intends to carry on with his

strong defense of the values of the Christian West rather than

compromise for the sake of building bonds with Islam.

 

"They went to the speech expecting to meet Pope Benedict, but

instead they met Professor Ratzinger," said the Rev. Khalil Samir, a

Vatican envoy for interfaith links in Lebanon.

 

In July 2005, about two months after assuming the papacy, Benedict

was asked if he considered Islam a religion of peace. He

said: "Certainly there are elements that favor peace. It also has

other elements."

 

The Rev. Robert Taft, a specialist in Islamic affairs at Rome's

Pontifical Oriental Institute, said it was unlikely the pope

miscalculated how some Muslims would receive his speech.

 

"The message he is sending is very, very clear," Taft

said. "Violence in the name of faith is never acceptable in any

religion and that (the pope) considers it his duty to challenge

Islam and anyone else on this."

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