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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 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 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 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 BibleJohn began the
prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the.
This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, 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!" - 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. 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; nonetheless it continues to be
love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is,
again to quote Paul -,worship in harmony with the eternal Word and
with our reason .
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."
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