The Pope’s lecture (this is said to be a "provisional text" – I assume he went off book at times, as he usually does – at the Univeresity of Regensburg. The text also says he will provide footnotes later.

I am currently working my way through it, but it is essentially an explication of the relationship between faith and reason, and the present challenges. More in a bit.

Hmmm. Actually not "reason," but Hellenistic thinking, which is to be distinguished from the "reason" that was the focus of 19th and 20th century philosophy.

All right.

Benedict began his lecture in the hall of memory – remembering what it was like to teach there, the openness of expression of ideas, the interaction between faculty and students:

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: the reality 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.

He then moves to his question, which he introduces, interestingly enough, by alluding to a 14th century dialogue between Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam.

The point he draws from the dialogue concerns the nature of God, but by way of jihad.

The Byzantine points out the surah which says, "There is no compulsion in religion" and asks the Persian to justify jihad in light of it. The Persian’s response is that God is beyond everything and is not bound by anything:

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.

The question these leads Benedict to explore is then:

As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?

He then traces the history of the relationship between Hebrew thought, Christian thought, and Greek thought, and then, beginning with Duns Scotus, the attempt to unravel them and the claim that Hellenistic thought is a culturally conditioned, dispensible framework of expression, leading up to the re-arrangement of the intellectual landscape in which "reason" is one thing and "faith" is another and never the twain shall meet.

The point, it seems to my feeble brain, is twofold: First, to understand the role of logos in our Christian thought, to help us understand that the roots of Christianity are not divorced from this, to show us why fideism and nominalism are not authentic expressions of the totality of Christian truth.

Secondly, to bring, not just Christianity, but religion, back into the discussion:

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 the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity. 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 (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.

It’s quite interesting on many levels, not surprisingly, but what fascinates me the most is the jumping-off point:

Oh, by the way – Islam is intellecutally incoherent and rooted in a false concept of God.

Moving on….