September 12, 2006, University of Regensburg
"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 skepticism it is still
necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the
use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the
Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was
accepted without question.
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by
Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried
on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the
erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated
Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of
both.
It was 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 [text unclear] 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 ... is contrary to
God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would
lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason
properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable
soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any
other means of threatening a person with death...".
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion
is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's
nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a
Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is
self-evident.
But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is
not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.
Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez,
who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not
bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to
reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to
practice idolatry.
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 Word".
This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, [text unclear]
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 St. 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 St.
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 [text unclear] 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 de-Hellenization 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 de-Hellenization: although interconnected, they are
clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and
objectives.
De-Hellenization 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 De-Hellenization, 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 de-Hellenization.
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 de-Hellenization, 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 milieu. This thesis
is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New
Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek
spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament
developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early
Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures.
Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship
between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith
itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith
itself.
And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad
strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to
do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment
and rejecting the insights of the modern age.
The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged
unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvelous possibilities
that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity
that has been granted to us.
The scientific ethos, moreover, is - 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."
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