More Benedict reading

Some more posts and pieces, which might be of interest, on the Pope and "the speech" . . .

Jacob Levy, at TNR's Open University, writes, in "Those Who Take Their Theology Seriously":

. . . In the post-Reformation west we've come to the view that religious argument ought to be conducted with words, not swords. But that is very different from supposing that the words in which religious argument is conducted ought to be nice touchy-feely ones--much less from supposing that religious argument ought not to take place at all. We ought to expect governments--the American government and the Israeli government, but also the Turkish government and the Pakistani government--to stay out of religious argument proper. But we ought to expect a religious leader to be willing (pace Frost on liberals) to take his or her own side in that argument.

Fr. James Schall writes, in a piece called "The Regensburg Lecture:  Thinking Rightly About God and Man":

. . .  [T]he pope does not only have Islam in mind. He has universities in view, as well as modern thought and other "cultures." The scope of this lecture is breathtaking. But essentially, it is first a theology of history -- it was no accident that the early apostles went to Macedonia, to the Greeks with their minds. The first thing that the early Christian mind had to encounter was mind itself, best represented by the Greeks, perhaps only by them at the time. What was at stake was this very issue about the Word -- the Logos -- about whether it was a kind of amorphous flux that could be this or that, good or bad, according to whatever it decided. Or was there a fundamental distinction in things, a realism that would eventually justify science and all else that man has discovered? Science, after all, has certain theological presuppositions that make it possible to be practiced.

This address is likewise a brief history of modern European philosophy -- that philosophy with roots in the two Testaments and in Greek and Roman thought. But Benedict recognizes that the modern mind is now more relativistic and skeptical. The modern mind doubts that there is reason, and doubts that we can both know and believe. It doubts that faith and reason belong to the same sphere, yet that is what Europe is. And Europe is not just another "culture," but is the culture in which the confrontation of reason and revelation took place and in which the relations were hammered out.

It is not without profound interest that the pope chose precisely a university in which to deliver this lecture. It is not an encyclical. It is not a "doctrinal" statement. It is not a homily. It is a lecture to a university faculty and to its students -- and not just to those in Regensburg sitting before him. In this sense it strikes at the very heart of the intellectual acaedia, to the intellectual sloth, of our time, to the refusal to think about the important thing with the tools that we have been given. What we know as universities in the modern world originated in the Church, in a space in which the whole could be talked about. Benedict knows that all disorders in politics and morals originate in the minds of the learned. It is there that we must begin to address our public issues, including that of Islam, but also questions of life, of morality, and of what we are about.

Here is Sandro Magister ("Islam's Unreasonable War Against Pope Benedict XVI"):

. . . [T]his is not a pope who submits himself to such censorship or self-censorship, which he sees as being inopportune and dangerous indeed when it concerns the pillars of his preaching. His goal on his trip to Germany was to illuminate before modern man – whether Christian, agnostic, or of another faith; from Europe, Africa, or Asia – that simple and supreme truth that is the other side of the truth to which he dedicated the encyclical “Deus Caritas Est.” God is love, but he is also reason, he is the “Logos.” And so when reason separates itself from God, it closes in upon itself. And likewise, faith in an “irrational” God, an absolute, unbridled will, can become the seed of violence. Every religion, culture, and civilization is exposed to this twofold error – not only Islam, but also Christianity, toward which the pope directed almost the entirety of his preaching.

And, Reul Marc Gerecht writes ("The Pope's Divisions"):

Let us be frank: There is absolutely nothing in the pope's speech that isn't appropriate or pertinent to a civilized discussion of revealed religions and ethics. Even if one is not a believer in any revealed faith, or has some memory of the conflict, daily cruelty and forced conversion meted out by representatives of Rome's bishops, or has some skepticism about the church's commitment to defending the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment, one can be thankful that the pope sees Christianity as a vehicle of peace and tries to explain why he thinks this is so.