…now has official versions in German, as well as Italian (perhaps Benedict originally wrote it in German, who knows.)
Teresa Benedetta has done an unofficial translation, and it is here.
Another unofficial translation, on a link a little easier to follow, has been posted at AsiaNews.
The speech answers the question in the title of this post, specifically in the context of a secular university, reaching to the broader question of – what can the Christian faith say to those pursuing knowledge?
He speaks of the office of the Pope, then the role of reason in religion, the religion in the pursuit of knowledge. It is a canny speech because his emphasis, at almost every turn, is on questioning and searching, presenting them as necessary elements of human life, even within the context of religious knowledge. What Christianity brings, ultimately, is reason grounded in the wisdom of human experience, understood in the context of Christian revelation – an important participant because it keeps the search aware of truth and the value of the human person.
Excerpts, via this unofficial translation:
Going back to my question at the start: What can a Pope say and what should he say in meeting with the university of his city? Reflecting on this, it seemed to me that it holds two other questions, whose clarification itself should lead to the answer.
In fact, one must ask: What is the nature and mission of the papacy? And likewise: What is the nature and mission of a university?
I will not keep you and me in any long disquisition on the nature of the Papacy. A brief observation will suffice.
The Pope is, first of all, Bishop of Rome, and as such, through the apostolic succession from the Apostle Peter, he has an episcopal responsibility for the entire Catholic Church. The word ‘bishop’ – episkopos – in its primary sense means ‘overseer’ – was already, in the New Testament, fused with the Biblical concept of the Shepherd.
The bishop is he who, from an elevated viewpoint, sees the whole picture, and takes care of showing the right way to all his flock and keeps them together. In this sense, this description of his task is oriented within the community of believers.
The Bishop-Pastor is the man who takes care of this community – he who keeps the flock together and puts them on the way to God, indicated – according to Christian faith – by Jesus, who not only indicates it: For us, He is the way himself.
But this community that the Bishop takes charge of, whether it is big or small, lives in the world. Its conditions, its course of action, its example and its words inevitably influence all the rest of the human community in its entirety.
The larger this community is, the more its good conditions or its eventual degradation will have repercussions on all of mankind. We see today with great clarity how the conditions of religions and the situation of the Church – its crises and its renewals – are able to have an impact on all of mankind. And so, the Pope, because he is the Pastor of his community, has also become increasingly a voice of ethical reason for mankind.
Here however, the objection may be raised right away that the Pope, in fact, could never truly speak on behalf of ethical reason, but would draw his views from the faith and so cannot claim that they are valid for those who do not share that faith.
We must return to this subject, because now the absolutely fundamental question arises: What is reason? How can a statement – above all a moral norm – show itself to be ‘reasonable’?
snip
Next we ask: What is a university? What is its mission? It is a huge question to which, once again, I can try to answer only in almost telegraphic style with some observations.
I think it can be said that the true intimate origin of the university is is the longing for knowledge, which is inherent in man. He wants to know about everything that is around him. He wants truth.
In this sense, one can see the self-questioning of Socrates as the impulse from which the Western university was born. I think, for example – to cite just one text – of his dispute with Eutiphrone, who defended before Socrates mythical religion and his devotion to it.
To this, Socrates asked in his turn: “You think that the gods really had wars against each other and terrible enmities and combats… Should we, Eutiphrone, say effectively that all this is true?” (6 b-c).
In this question which seems to be far from devout – but which, in Socrates, arose from a religiosity that was purer and more profound than the search for the truly divine God – the Christians of the first centuries recognized themselves and their journey. They had received their faith not in a positivist mode, or as a way out of unappeased desires; they understood it as the dissolution of the fog of mythological religion to make way for the discovery of that God who is creative Reason and at the same time God-Love.
That is why, self-questioning about God, as also about the true nature and true sense of the human being,was, for them, not a problematic form of a lack of religiosity, but it was part of the essence of their way of being religious.
Thus they had no need to let go or to temporarily shelve Socratic self-questioning, but they could and they had to welcome it, recognizing as part of their own identity the exhausting attempts by reason to arrive at knowledge of the entire truth. And so, it became possible – rather it had to be – that the university was born in the context of Christian faith, in the Christian world.
snip
The Christian message, based on its origins, should always be an encouragement towards the truth, and therefore, a force against the pressure of power and interests.
The danger for the Western world – to speak of this alone – is that man today, especially considering the greatness of his knowledge and power, surrenders when faced with the question of truth. This would mean that reason ultimately folds up from the pressure of interests and the attractiveness of utility, being forced to recognize it as the ultimate criterion.
Up to now, I have been speaking of the medieval university, trying nonetheless to let the permanent nature of the university and its mission come through. In modern times, new dimensions of knowledge have opened up, and in the university, they are appreciated most of all in two spheres: above all, in the natural sciences, which have developed on the basis of the link between experimentation and the presumed rationality of matter; and in the second place, in the historical and humanistic sciences, in whuich man – scrutinizing the mirror of history, and clarifying the dimensions of his nature, seeks to understand himself better.
This development has opened to mankind not only an immense meassure of knowledge and power, but it has also developed the knowledge and acknowledgment of human rights and human dignity, for which we can only be grateful.
But man’s journey can never be said to be complete, and the danger of falling into inhumanity can never be simply abjured – as we see in the panorama of current affaris.
Stated from the point of view of the structure of the university, there is a danger that philosophy, no longer feeling capable of its true mission, degenerates into positivism; that theology, with its message addressed to reason, becomes confined to the private sphere of a group or groups.
If however, reason, solicitous of its presumed purity, becomes deaf to the great message that comes from the Christian faith and its wisdom, it would wither up like a tree whose roots no longer reach the waters that give it life. It would lose its courage for the truth and will stop being great – it would diminish.
Applied to our European culture, this means: if reason wishes to self-construct itself circumscribed by its own argumentation and that which convinces it for the moment, and – preoccupied with its secularity – cuts itself off from the roots through which it lives, then it does not become more reasonable and pure, but will decompose and break up.
With this, I return to our starting point. What does the Pope have to do or say in the university? Certainly, he should not seek to impose the faith in authoritarian fashion, because faith can only be given in freedom.
Beyond his ministry as Pastor of the Church and on the basis of the intrinsic nature of this pastoral ministry, it is his task to keep alive the sensitivity for truth; to invite reason ever anew to set itself to a quest for the truth, for goodness, for God; and along this path, call on it to be aware of the useful lights that have emerged throughout the history of the Christian faith, and thereby to perceive Jesus Christ as the Light who illumines history and helps us find the way to the future.
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