Appropos of Rob's post, MOJ-readers may be interested in this, from John Allen of NCR, 9/15/06:
I was forced to miss this week's trip
by Benedict XVI to Bavaria due to lectures I had agreed months ago to
give in Irvine , California , and Cleveland. Among other things, this
means I had to pass up the world's best sausage and beer, and as I told
both groups to which I spoke, they will never need additional evidence
of the full measure of my devotion to their cause.
(It turns out that local Bavarian authorities banned the sale of
beer during events on the papal itinerary, but the word from colleagues
on the trip is that this did not prove an insurmountable obstacle).
Even at a distance, it's possible to offer some general observations about the Sept. 9-14 homecoming of Benedict XVI.
I have written before that Benedict XVI is not a PC pope. By that, I
don't mean that he sets out to give offense; on the contrary, he's one
of the most gracious figures ever to step on the world stage. Instead,
he simply does not allow his thinking to be channeled by the taboos and
fashions of ordinary public discourse.
For example, any PR consultant would have told the pope that if he
wanted to make a point about the relationship between faith and reason,
he shouldn't open up with a comparison between Islam and Christianity
that would be widely understood as a criticism of Islam, suggesting
that it's irrational and prone to violence. Yet that is precisely what
Benedict did in his address to 1,500 students and faculty at the
University of Regensburg on Wednesday, citing a 14th century dialogue
between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a learned
Persian.
News headlines immediately focused upon the pope's use of the term
jihad and its implied swipe at Muslim-influenced terrorism, shaping up
as something of a replay of the Danish cartoon controversy.
Yet he brought up the dialogue between Paleologus and the Persian to
make a different point. Under the influence of its Greek heritage, he
said, Christianity represents a decisive choice in favor of the
rationality of God. While Muslims may stress God's majesty and absolute
transcendence, Christians believe it would contradict God's nature to
act irrationally. He argued that the Gospel of John spoke the last word
on the biblical concept of God: In the beginning was the logos, usually translated as word, but it is also the Greek term for reason.
The lecture, titled "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and
Reflections," ran to almost 4,000 words (more than a half-hour of
speaking time), and its main concern was with what Benedict sees as an
artificial truncation of human reason in the West. Since the
Reformation, he argued, Western thinkers have come to regard theology
and metaphysics as unscientific.
That is problematic, Benedict said, on two counts.
First, it leaves reason mute before the great questions of life and
death, questions about why we are here and how we should act.
This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, the pope said, 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.
Second, its logically self-defeating for science itself, which
depends upon the assumption of order and reason in the universe, but
cant explain why things should work that way in the first place.
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, the pope said. 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.
Ultimately, Benedict argued, a form of reason which rejects
religious and philosophical thinking cannot promote dialogue with other
cultures.
In the Western world, it is widely held that only positivistic
reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid,
he said. 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.
Whatever the merits of Benedict's argument, it is a subtle and
carefully modulated analysis of Western intellectual history head and
shoulders above the standard fare most leaders offer on the stump. Of
course, that's not what the world is talking about right now, raising
the question of whether Benedict could do with a dash more sensitivity
to how wires in today's hair-trigger world are tripped.
The Vatican on Thursday issued a statement insisting that Benedict
had no intention of giving offense, and that part of his argument at
Regensburg was precisely in favor of respect of the religious
convictions of humanity.
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