'The Dialogue Of Cultures'?

His lecture, which ran over half an hour, quoted "theerudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on thesubject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both ... Without descendingto details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the"Book" and the "infidels", he [the Byzantine emperor]addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central questionabout 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".

But this was not all. Islam made up just three paragraphs of the lecture,as he expounded on his most pressing worry viz. how Western science and philosophyand reason had divorced themselves from faith — leading to the secularization of European society. Observers were quick to point to undercurrents of his main worry, the resultant falling Mass attendance (in Germany, it has fallen tounder 15 percent) and the increasing immigrations of Muslims and conversions toIslam clashing with his aim of proselytizing. 

Predictably his remarks on Islam have resulted in an immediate furore, withreferences to the "Nazi Pope" by bloggers who fumed that the Pope had jumped on the bandwagon of"Islamofacism" and the Byzantine Emperor's question about Islam was bound toinvite counter questions about Jesus. Significantly, the Pope, unlike his predecessor John Paul, as Cardinal Ratzinger, hadnever approved of joint prayers with Muslims and even as a Pope has never shiedaway from expressing his skepticism of the benefits of inter-religiousdialogue. In 2004, he had caused a stir by openly opposing membership of Turkey in the European Unionon the grounds that it "always represented another continent throughout history, in permanent contrast withEurope." The articulation of his skepticism about Islam’s openness to change, given its view of the Koran as the unchangeable word ofGod, is nothing new for those who have followed the current Pope's career. 

But has he been more than provocative this time? As Renzo Guolo, a professor of the sociology of religion at the University ofPadua, points out, "This is maybe the strongest criticism because he doesn’t speak of fundamentalist Islam but of Islamgenerally. Not all Islam, thank God, is fundamentalist."

Predictably, the chief Vatican spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, had tostep in for damage control: "I believe that everyone understands, even inside Islam, there are many different positions, and there are many positions that aren’tviolent. Here, certainly, the pope doesn’t want to give a lesson, let’s say, an interpretation of Islam, as violent.He is saying, in the case of a violent interpretation of religion, we are in a contradiction with the nature of God and the nature of thesoul".

In the interest of full context and, to ensure that the raging controversyover the remarks of is placed in perspective, we provide the full text ofthe lecture entitled Faith, Reason and the University - Memories andReflections from the official Vatican website which, significantly, notes that the Pope"intends to supply a subsequent version of this text, complete withfootnotes. The present text must therefore be consideredprovisional". © Copyright 2006 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

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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 beable once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those yearswhen, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching atthe University of Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university madeup of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants norsecretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students andin particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and afterlessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange withhistorians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the twotheological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, whenprofessors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entireuniversity, making possible a genuine experience of universitas -something that you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned - the experience, inother words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make itdifficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working ineverything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects andsharing responsibility for the right use of reason - this reality became a livedexperience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties.It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they toocarried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the universitasscientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologiansseek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherencewithin the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reportedthat a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it hadtwo faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in theface of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raisethe question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context ofthe tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole,was accepted without question.

In the seventh conversation (*4V8,>4H - controversy) edited by ProfessorKhoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must haveknown 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, whenMohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor alsoknew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerningholy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatmentaccorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", headdresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central questionabout the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying:"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will findthings only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword thefaith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself soforcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faiththrough violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with thenature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is notpleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (F×< 8`(T) is contrary to God'snature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone tofaith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violenceand threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, orweapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person withdeath...".

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practiceof religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is theconviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greekidea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see theprofound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and thebiblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book ofGenesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of hisGospel with the words: "In the beginning was the 8`(@H". This is thevery word used by the emperor: God acts, F×< 8`(T, with logos. Logosmeans both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable ofself-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on thebiblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuousthreads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginningwas the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. Theencounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen bychance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in adream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and helpus!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a"distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement betweenBiblical faith and Greek inquiry.

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trendsin theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and theChristian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustineand Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its laterdevelopments, 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 donethe opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positionswhich clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of acapricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendenceand 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 remaineternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed tothis, 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 realanalogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikenessremains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishinganalogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him awayfrom us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God isthe God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has actedand continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paulsays, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving morethan thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love ofthe God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quotePaul - "8@(46¬ 8"JD,\"", worship in harmony with theeternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral partof Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization ofChristianity - a call which has more and more dominated theological discussionssince the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can beobserved in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they areclearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of theReformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastictheology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totallyconditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based onan alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a livinghistorical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. Theprinciple of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure,primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appearedas a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberatedin order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed toset thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programmeforward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thusanchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality asa whole.