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. 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`(@H". 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. *

(c) Copyright 2006 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

 Source:BBC World Service.

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