Just a few notes so far, with a bit of repetition, which I will hope you will forgive.

First, the text of the Pope’s Regensburg address is here.

Cardinal Bertone’s statement from today – in English and Italian – is here.

There is no reason to depend on media (or blogger!) reports of what either says – there is no excuse, either. To think this through requires reading both. They are the essential texts for this discussion, and any commentary on "what the Pope said" (such as the wretched NYTimes editorial from this morning) which does not reflect a reading the whole does not merit attention.

What did the Pope say? As discussed here over the past few days, the Pope’s address, given in his old university where he once taught, was an examination of faith and reason. But even as we begin there we must be careful and go back to exactly what the Pope said. He is not discussing it in the way we popularly think of these terms – as in faith (a belief in the unseeen and unprovable) and reason (the process of "proving" via the scientific method or other positivist means.)

For example, later in his talk, the Pope critques the fruit of the Enlightenment:

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.

So the first task is to grasp the definition of "Reason" at work here. The old Catholic Encyclopedia article might give you a sense of the traditional Catholic understanding of the concept. Reason is, essentially, the capacity to think,  to know and to establish value  – to observe and to draw conclusions from what we observe.

More recently than the CE, of course, John Paul II wrote an entire encyclical on the topic of Fides and Ratio.

It is no accident that, when the sacred author comes to describe the wise man, he portrays him as one who loves and seeks the truth: “Happy the man who meditates on wisdom and reasons intelligently, who reflects in his heart on her ways and ponders her secrets. He pursues her like a hunter and lies in wait on her paths. He peers through her windows and listens at her doors. He camps near her house and fastens his tent-peg to her walls; he pitches his tent near her and so finds an excellent resting-place; he places his children under her protection and lodges under her boughs; by her he is sheltered from the heat and he dwells in the shade of her glory” (Sir 14:20-27).

For the inspired writer, as we see, the desire for knowledge is characteristic of all people. Intelligence enables everyone, believer and non-believer, to reach “the deep waters” of knowledge (cf. Prov 20:5). It is true that ancient Israel did not come to knowledge of the world and its phenomena by way of abstraction, as did the Greek philosopher or the Egyptian sage. Still less did the good Israelite understand knowledge in the way of the modern world which tends more to distinguish different kinds of knowing. Nonetheless, the biblical world has made its own distinctive contribution to the theory of knowledge.

What is distinctive in the biblical text is the conviction that there is a profound and indissoluble unity between the knowledge of reason and the knowledge of faith. The world and all that happens within it, including history and the fate of peoples, are realities to be observed, analysed and assessed with all the resources of reason, but without faith ever being foreign to the process. Faith intervenes not to abolish reason’s autonomy nor to reduce its scope for action, but solely to bring the human being to understand that in these events it is the God of Israel who acts. Thus the world and the events of history cannot be understood in depth without professing faith in the God who is at work in them. Faith sharpens the inner eye, opening the mind to discover in the flux of events the workings of Providence. Here the words of the Book of Proverbs are pertinent: “The human mind plans the way, but the Lord directs the steps” (16:9). This is to say that with the light of reason human beings can know which path to take, but they can follow that path to its end, quickly and unhindered, only if with a rightly tuned spirit they search for it within the horizon of faith. Therefore, reason and faith cannot be separated without diminishing the capacity of men and women to know themselves, the world and God in an appropriate way.

I point these out mostly for newcomers, and those who’ve never really looked seroiusly at the relationship between faith and reason before, who have bought the contemporary distortion that religion is all about "blind faith" as opposed to the sturdy, data-based deductions of "science." All major religions expend energy in teasing out the issue, and it all starts with one simple observation:

As the ancient philosophers noted, one can "deduce" the existence of God through one’s reason – through what we observe about the world. (Perhaps not "prove" – but the evidence can be accumulated and conclusions can be drawn) It is not enough – it only gets us so far, but it is necessary.

The discussion of faith and reason is not a new one in Christianity, in case you were unaware of that.

The Pope’s broad topic then, was…what happened? Why has religion been limited to the private sphere of individual belief in the modern world? Why is religion no longer viewed as a way to know that has explanatory value?

And so he proceeds through his talk to look at some history, and if you read the talk, you see that the greatest, strongest critique is directed to "modernity" – which might see as the product of the West:

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.

2. An essential theological/philosophical point to grasp, and that which the Pope’s reference to Islam turns, is this: In the Jewish/Christian schema, in which reason and faith are seen as emanating from the same source, and this, well-put by Daniel Larison:

The crucial difference is that for Christianity, as expressed through the categories of Greek language and Hellenistic philosophy, God is His own Word, which is Reason (Logos), Who is His co-essential Son and eternally One with Him from before the ages, whereas Allah’s word is the eternal Qur’an, which has no obvious or necessary relationship to reason, and which he could nonetheless repudiate at any time if he so chose.  Put more dramatically, Christians believe that God gave His own Reason for our sakes that we might become like Him, while Muslims believe that they ought to obey and submit to the will of Allah even if he were to command them to do the most unreasonable things.

And IN THIS CONTEXT, the question of violence is touched on. In the dialogue Benedict cites,

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?

Benedict is drawing conclusions about the justification of religious violence. If one revelation of God declares that there is compulsion in religion, and then that same religion converts by compulsion, one must conclude then, that God is not bound by his own revelation about his own nature – which then makes him totally unknowable, and the only response for the believer becomes blind adherence to the will of God.

Faith and reason: put at odds by moderrnity and by fideists and nominalists within religion itself. He uses Islam as a starting point, but also notes, for example, Duns Scotus as at fault in this regard.

An interesting, meaty lecture by a brilliant man.

So?

Next post…