A Catholic church or cathedral (read: large church) (link connects to my best guess of which church that is) - is featured in Spiderman 3.
That's the place Spidey (ie. Peter Parker) goes when he realises his little Jazz-ballroom dance thingy-in-a-bar revenge show-up of Mary Jane using Gwen Stacy has gone a little too far, apparently for some quiet contemplation. Also featured in Spiderman 2.
This follows on from the Catholic church featured prominently in Daredevil (see the very first scene - same church, me-thinks...).
What is it with Hollywood and Catholic Churches? How come we don't see superheroes seeking contemplation, redemption and the odd property-destroying fight-scene in Orthodox or Anglican/Episcopal or - yeeks - Pentecostal Charismatic Evangelical warehouse-type churches? Or, perhaps, a Shinto temple or a Mosque?
Here's where Catholic churches, especially those of the traditional French Gothic design, have a couple of advantages.
Firstly, they're somewhat more familiar and "comfortable" to be in, to the West, and that includes the Anglophile East, even in today's widely-travelled, multi-religious, even somewhat irreligious, secular world, than Orthodox churches and buildings of other religions. Quite a few are architectural representatives of the cities they were built in.
Secondly, they use 3-D imagery (read: impressive (as in, makes a lasting impression!) architecture, interior design and icons) a lot - to convey the essential truths or values of the religion. Jesus crucified, the theme of sacrifice: see both our favourite blind lawyer and his arch-enemy Bullseye in Daredevil. Bell tolls for those who seek salvation: see Spiderman in Spiderman 3. High church spire: quiet contemplation; attaining peace through forgiveness, the double-edged sword of hate and revenge, etc - see both movies. So, if you want to use some kind of quasi-religious imagery to get your moral high point across, Catholics have an advantage over your average Hillsong-type concert hall or hotel ballroom Evangelical outfit.
All goes to show that Messrs Luther, Calvin, Melanchton, Zwingli & Co just got it all wrong when they decided to throw out and burn their icons in favour of the Word. It wasn't even right to call them "idols" when they were just icons. Talk about a senseless contribution to global warming, not to mention an overly optimistic view of literacy rates in Reformation Europe (the reason for Protestantism being restricted to just Northern and Western Europe perhaps?)
But oh, don't worry. I won't get into a "How to Find God in Spiderman 3" here. That's already been done, sort of, in a movie review here.
Cheers. And ignore the critics. Spidey 3 is a great movie; 'tis true that it won't win any Academy Awards, the pace is just waaay too fast for proper development, but it is a great movie nonetheless, with some great scenes and good acting, and a very good moral message for the viewer to boot. Well worth the RM11 per ticket + RM1 for a couple seat that Cathay Cinemas is charging...
LMT
LawMan's Dogs
Killer Beasts Doing Breakfast
Showing posts with label Christian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian. Show all posts
Monday, May 07, 2007
Monday, January 15, 2007
‘Rocky’ Stallone back in church as new movie in theaters
http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=22474
I've always been a bit of an admirer of Sylvester Stallone. Suffered from Bell's Palsy, which affects the facial muscles and basically causes at least partial paralysis of the face. Father at 50. Played truant from the Vietnam War somewhere in Europe. Man behind Rocky and (urg urg) Rambo. Blazed the trail for Arnie and a whole generation of B-grade on-screen tough guys like Seagal and Norris and that quintessential Caucasian guy - Lundberg or Lundgren or something. Yeah.
But I never knew this guy was born Catholic. In fact I never thought of Rocky, Rambo Roman (Catholic) and Religion in the same sentence.
So this article came as a real eye-opener to me. I have extracted some bits of it for you, dear reader, to taste:-
"Stallone's shift back to church started when his daughter Sophia was "born sick," Stallone said in a Dec. 7 telephone interview from Dallas to promote his new movie, "Rocky Balboa."
In November 1996, at age 2 months, Sophia underwent open-heart surgery at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center.
The operation went well, and Sophia, now 10, is doing "great," Stallone said. "She's the No. 1 athlete in her class."
Stallone tried to find the words to describe what brought about his self-imposed exile from Catholicism.
"I don't know. Life," he said. "Your career is going, you're not communicating with your family."
The weight of celebrity was "very heavy," he added. "I didn't have any strong foundation behind me of people that would keep my feet on the ground. I was extremely seduced by the newfound freedom."
"When I got married everything changed," he said. "When my daughter was born sick, and I realized I really needed some help here, I started putting everything in God's hands, his omnipotence, his all-forgivingness."
If you're rolling your eyes at the prospect of a 60-year-old Stallone playing an aging boxer, that's OK with him.
"I actually embrace that, and the rolling of their eyes (is) a 100 percent natural valid reaction. I rolled my eyes when I thought of it," Stallone said. "You can't judge anything until you see it. When you see the film, it's about actually being able to listen to your heart and not so much your mind, following the guidance of someone much more powerful than you: Jesus.
"In 'Rocky I,' the first person we saw was Jesus," he said, referring to an opening scene of the boxing club where there is a big mural of Jesus on a back wall."
Full article: click on the link above.
LMT
I've always been a bit of an admirer of Sylvester Stallone. Suffered from Bell's Palsy, which affects the facial muscles and basically causes at least partial paralysis of the face. Father at 50. Played truant from the Vietnam War somewhere in Europe. Man behind Rocky and (urg urg) Rambo. Blazed the trail for Arnie and a whole generation of B-grade on-screen tough guys like Seagal and Norris and that quintessential Caucasian guy - Lundberg or Lundgren or something. Yeah.
But I never knew this guy was born Catholic. In fact I never thought of Rocky, Rambo Roman (Catholic) and Religion in the same sentence.
So this article came as a real eye-opener to me. I have extracted some bits of it for you, dear reader, to taste:-
"Stallone's shift back to church started when his daughter Sophia was "born sick," Stallone said in a Dec. 7 telephone interview from Dallas to promote his new movie, "Rocky Balboa."
In November 1996, at age 2 months, Sophia underwent open-heart surgery at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center.
The operation went well, and Sophia, now 10, is doing "great," Stallone said. "She's the No. 1 athlete in her class."
Stallone tried to find the words to describe what brought about his self-imposed exile from Catholicism.
"I don't know. Life," he said. "Your career is going, you're not communicating with your family."
The weight of celebrity was "very heavy," he added. "I didn't have any strong foundation behind me of people that would keep my feet on the ground. I was extremely seduced by the newfound freedom."
"When I got married everything changed," he said. "When my daughter was born sick, and I realized I really needed some help here, I started putting everything in God's hands, his omnipotence, his all-forgivingness."
If you're rolling your eyes at the prospect of a 60-year-old Stallone playing an aging boxer, that's OK with him.
"I actually embrace that, and the rolling of their eyes (is) a 100 percent natural valid reaction. I rolled my eyes when I thought of it," Stallone said. "You can't judge anything until you see it. When you see the film, it's about actually being able to listen to your heart and not so much your mind, following the guidance of someone much more powerful than you: Jesus.
"In 'Rocky I,' the first person we saw was Jesus," he said, referring to an opening scene of the boxing club where there is a big mural of Jesus on a back wall."
Full article: click on the link above.
LMT
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
The Pope's Visit to Turkey
Pope Benedict XVI is visiting Turkey. Today. Or, well, yesterday, since it is already 1am local time.
This is going to be interesting to watch.
The Pope will fight for the rights of religious minorities in Muslim countries.
He will confront Muslim thinkers about that arm of their religion that genuinely believes that violence against non-believers (and of course, for this particular arm the category of "non-believers" is very wide) is sanctioned by God.
He may attempt a closer relationship (a reconciliation?) between the Greek and Latin Churches, a schism which predates the Protestant Reformation.
I for one am happy to see a Pope who doesn't mince his words, doesn't toe the politically correct line, and who says what needs to be said.
Where fighting for minority rights is concerned, he is not advocating some fresh Crusade, nor does he support religious bigotry. Instead, he is simply being honest about the experience that Christians and other non-Muslims have living in modern-day Muslim-majority countries (we are not talking history here, just modern-day reality). He is asking the Muslim majority-countries for the kind of treatment towards their non-Muslim minorities that Muslims in the minority in the secular West have received and come to take for granted, nay, demand, from their host governments. He is not afraid to annoy and offend, he is only concerned to speak the truth. That's the way it should be.
Where violence by Muslims who explicitly justify their actions by reference to their God is concerned, the Pope, I hope, will be asking some very hard questions of the "Ulama" (term used very loosely here) who wrote that letter explaining the Islamic position to him after he made his now famous (or notorious, of course, depending on your point of view) speech at Regensburg. Why is it that such a significant number of Muslims - perhaps a majority of the total "Umah" in some countries - do NOT behave as might be expected if, as the Muslim scholars claimed, Islam is essentially a peaceful and tolerant religion? Why did these Muslims - followers of a peace-loving religion, it is claimed - feel entitled to commit murder, arson, and vandalism in the name of protecting the "dignity" of their religion, when all that the Pope did was to make a speech in a faraway land where a majority of the population are no longer really Christian, nor anti-Muslim? Did Christians burn their mosques, kill their women and children, destroy their livelihoods on the basis and as a consequence of the Regensburg address?
And finally - on the issue of reconciliation with the Greeks - it is good that the various denominations are finding common ground, as there are bigger fish to fry. It is time for Christians of all stripes, pre- and post- Reformation, to unite and confront the Islamic extremist - both the out-in-the-open Al Qaeda/Taliban variety and the more insidious "quiet Islamist" attempting to slowly drive currently secular countries such as Malaysia into becoming "Islamic" kingdoms or republics. It is time to "fight the good fight" - the Christian JIHAD - by which I mean "STRUGGLE, NOT WAR" which may be "NON-VIOLENT as well as violent" - yep, I can borrow from the Muslim lexicon as well as anyone - to show that non-Muslims are not, for the sake of political correctness, going to back down in the face of increasingly arrogant and unreasonable demands from their Muslim compatriots.
LMT
This is going to be interesting to watch.
The Pope will fight for the rights of religious minorities in Muslim countries.
He will confront Muslim thinkers about that arm of their religion that genuinely believes that violence against non-believers (and of course, for this particular arm the category of "non-believers" is very wide) is sanctioned by God.
He may attempt a closer relationship (a reconciliation?) between the Greek and Latin Churches, a schism which predates the Protestant Reformation.
I for one am happy to see a Pope who doesn't mince his words, doesn't toe the politically correct line, and who says what needs to be said.
Where fighting for minority rights is concerned, he is not advocating some fresh Crusade, nor does he support religious bigotry. Instead, he is simply being honest about the experience that Christians and other non-Muslims have living in modern-day Muslim-majority countries (we are not talking history here, just modern-day reality). He is asking the Muslim majority-countries for the kind of treatment towards their non-Muslim minorities that Muslims in the minority in the secular West have received and come to take for granted, nay, demand, from their host governments. He is not afraid to annoy and offend, he is only concerned to speak the truth. That's the way it should be.
Where violence by Muslims who explicitly justify their actions by reference to their God is concerned, the Pope, I hope, will be asking some very hard questions of the "Ulama" (term used very loosely here) who wrote that letter explaining the Islamic position to him after he made his now famous (or notorious, of course, depending on your point of view) speech at Regensburg. Why is it that such a significant number of Muslims - perhaps a majority of the total "Umah" in some countries - do NOT behave as might be expected if, as the Muslim scholars claimed, Islam is essentially a peaceful and tolerant religion? Why did these Muslims - followers of a peace-loving religion, it is claimed - feel entitled to commit murder, arson, and vandalism in the name of protecting the "dignity" of their religion, when all that the Pope did was to make a speech in a faraway land where a majority of the population are no longer really Christian, nor anti-Muslim? Did Christians burn their mosques, kill their women and children, destroy their livelihoods on the basis and as a consequence of the Regensburg address?
And finally - on the issue of reconciliation with the Greeks - it is good that the various denominations are finding common ground, as there are bigger fish to fry. It is time for Christians of all stripes, pre- and post- Reformation, to unite and confront the Islamic extremist - both the out-in-the-open Al Qaeda/Taliban variety and the more insidious "quiet Islamist" attempting to slowly drive currently secular countries such as Malaysia into becoming "Islamic" kingdoms or republics. It is time to "fight the good fight" - the Christian JIHAD - by which I mean "STRUGGLE, NOT WAR" which may be "NON-VIOLENT as well as violent" - yep, I can borrow from the Muslim lexicon as well as anyone - to show that non-Muslims are not, for the sake of political correctness, going to back down in the face of increasingly arrogant and unreasonable demands from their Muslim compatriots.
LMT
New Line Cinema ("The Lord of the Rings") releases "The Nativity". Read all about it here...
http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=22127
By "here", of course, I mean the above link. It's an article about the genesis of the movie. Here's an extract, to show you the tone or style of the article; Christian readers will agree that there really is something for everyone in this show...
"Genesis of a script
“The Nativity Story” was written by Mike Rich, a former radio news announcer in Portland, Ore. His previous medium-budget films, “Finding Forrester” (2000), “The Rookie” (2002) and “Radio” (2003), had all done well at the box office, but Rich wanted to move outside the sports genre for his next feature. “As a screenwriter, I love stories about ordinary people who do extraordinary things; this is my consistent theme as a cinematic storyteller. And I had always wanted to write ‘The Nativity Story,’ which is about ordinary people who did extraordinary things,” he told me in an interview.
In December 2004, both Newsweek and Time ran cover articles about Christ’s birth. This sparked Rich’s interest in taking a different approach to the Christmas story. Early in 2005, his father, Jack, passed away at the age of 67. This event, said Rich, made him feel that he could take on a subject of such magnitude “to write more spiritually about things that matter, because my father was always a strong supporter of my writing and the stories I was trying to tell. He was a great father, who held a very special place in his heart for the Christmas season.”
Rich belongs to the Southwest Bible Church near Portland. His wife, Grace, and their three children, Jessica, Caitlan and Michael, are Catholics and active members of St. Cecilia Parish in Beaverton, Ore.
When Rich began researching his topic, he knew that the primary source material was very limited, mostly chapters 1 and 2 of the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Over the 11 months he prepared to write the script, what he calls the “nuts and bolts” phase of screenwriting, he consulted the works of Jewish scholars, as well as books by Raymond Brown (Birth of the Messiah), Peter Richardson (Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans) and John Meier (A Marginal Jew), all Catholic biblical scholars.
“I felt a little trepidation as I approached the actual writing,” Rich admitted. “If I kept only to the gospels, I would have a 20-minute movie. So I decided to tell the story of Mary’s journey from the perspective of character. I realized it would take some speculation and visualization to do this, and at the same time I was committed to staying completely true to the story and faithful to its tone.”
“I wanted to write during the Advent season so I could be immersed in its spirit,” Rich said. “Shortly after Thanksgiving in 2005, I made my way through my home office – there is barely a path to get from the door to my desk because it is surrounded with research and junk,” he said with a laugh – “with a sense of peace and purpose. This is not always the case, because scripts are difficult to write. But I began each day by playing Amy Grant’s song ‘Breath of Heaven,’ what she calls ‘Mary’s Song,’ about Mary contemplating the wondrous thing that had happened to her. I also surrounded myself with figurines from the crèche to visualize what I wanted to write.”
Rich typically writes no more than five hours a day. He spends the rest of the day formulating the next day’s scenes. He takes a very disciplined approach to writing. Many people are surprised to learn that most screenwriters write no more than four pages a day – four minutes in film time. A two-hour movie is based on a 120-page script."
Readers will find the background to the movie fascinating - I hadn't heard anyone describe herself as a "Texas Presbyterian" before (Catherine Hardwicke, the director); Keisha Castle-Hughes, who plays Mary, is pregnant at the age of 16 and unmarried. She claims she is "free" but her "grandparents are Catholic". The only American actor in the movie is Oscar Isaac, who plays "the most silent man in sacred scripture" - Joseph, the husband of Mary, (NOT he of Arimathea) a.k.a. Jesus' "father".
Nativity plays are common in Catholic (and some other denominations') Christmas celebrations. "New Evangelicals" in particular, might want to google for further information on Nativity plays before watching the movie.
LMT
By "here", of course, I mean the above link. It's an article about the genesis of the movie. Here's an extract, to show you the tone or style of the article; Christian readers will agree that there really is something for everyone in this show...
"Genesis of a script
“The Nativity Story” was written by Mike Rich, a former radio news announcer in Portland, Ore. His previous medium-budget films, “Finding Forrester” (2000), “The Rookie” (2002) and “Radio” (2003), had all done well at the box office, but Rich wanted to move outside the sports genre for his next feature. “As a screenwriter, I love stories about ordinary people who do extraordinary things; this is my consistent theme as a cinematic storyteller. And I had always wanted to write ‘The Nativity Story,’ which is about ordinary people who did extraordinary things,” he told me in an interview.
In December 2004, both Newsweek and Time ran cover articles about Christ’s birth. This sparked Rich’s interest in taking a different approach to the Christmas story. Early in 2005, his father, Jack, passed away at the age of 67. This event, said Rich, made him feel that he could take on a subject of such magnitude “to write more spiritually about things that matter, because my father was always a strong supporter of my writing and the stories I was trying to tell. He was a great father, who held a very special place in his heart for the Christmas season.”
Rich belongs to the Southwest Bible Church near Portland. His wife, Grace, and their three children, Jessica, Caitlan and Michael, are Catholics and active members of St. Cecilia Parish in Beaverton, Ore.
When Rich began researching his topic, he knew that the primary source material was very limited, mostly chapters 1 and 2 of the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Over the 11 months he prepared to write the script, what he calls the “nuts and bolts” phase of screenwriting, he consulted the works of Jewish scholars, as well as books by Raymond Brown (Birth of the Messiah), Peter Richardson (Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans) and John Meier (A Marginal Jew), all Catholic biblical scholars.
“I felt a little trepidation as I approached the actual writing,” Rich admitted. “If I kept only to the gospels, I would have a 20-minute movie. So I decided to tell the story of Mary’s journey from the perspective of character. I realized it would take some speculation and visualization to do this, and at the same time I was committed to staying completely true to the story and faithful to its tone.”
“I wanted to write during the Advent season so I could be immersed in its spirit,” Rich said. “Shortly after Thanksgiving in 2005, I made my way through my home office – there is barely a path to get from the door to my desk because it is surrounded with research and junk,” he said with a laugh – “with a sense of peace and purpose. This is not always the case, because scripts are difficult to write. But I began each day by playing Amy Grant’s song ‘Breath of Heaven,’ what she calls ‘Mary’s Song,’ about Mary contemplating the wondrous thing that had happened to her. I also surrounded myself with figurines from the crèche to visualize what I wanted to write.”
Rich typically writes no more than five hours a day. He spends the rest of the day formulating the next day’s scenes. He takes a very disciplined approach to writing. Many people are surprised to learn that most screenwriters write no more than four pages a day – four minutes in film time. A two-hour movie is based on a 120-page script."
Readers will find the background to the movie fascinating - I hadn't heard anyone describe herself as a "Texas Presbyterian" before (Catherine Hardwicke, the director); Keisha Castle-Hughes, who plays Mary, is pregnant at the age of 16 and unmarried. She claims she is "free" but her "grandparents are Catholic". The only American actor in the movie is Oscar Isaac, who plays "the most silent man in sacred scripture" - Joseph, the husband of Mary, (NOT he of Arimathea) a.k.a. Jesus' "father".
Nativity plays are common in Catholic (and some other denominations') Christmas celebrations. "New Evangelicals" in particular, might want to google for further information on Nativity plays before watching the movie.
LMT
Monday, November 06, 2006
There is No Compulsion in Religion. Amen.
.... and so, it is ok to create a reasonable apprehension of violence to Indian children about to take their first Holy Communion. I guess we should all look on the bright side: the police, for once, were on the side of the good guys, the ones with any sense at all in this, and the Pious, God-fearing, Self Righteous, "We-Shall-Be- Saved-and-You-Shall-Burn" Muslim Heroes of Ipoh attempting to save their fellow co-religionists from Apostasy by, if necessary, violence, and against those co-religionists' free will to boot, were taught a lesson in humility, not to mention actually getting their basic facts right.
The Star Online: Print Edition < Previous | Home | Print Edition | Next > Monday November 6, 2006 Cops to probe baptism SMS By CHAN LI LEEN IPOH: The police are investigating a rumour which spread like wildfire through SMS, claiming that a group of Muslims will be baptised at a church here. As a result, a large crowd gathered at the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes in Silibin from 7.30am yesterday to protest against the alleged baptism only to find out that it was actually the first Holy Communion for 98 Indian children. State police chief Deputy Comm Datuk Aziz Bulat said the police would verify how the SMS had started. “There could be some people out there who have a personal agenda to create disharmony among the races,” he said when met at the church. DCP Aziz said the police had also received the text message and had, therefore, placed the Federal Reserve Unit on standby since 7am. He advised the public to be wary of such messages. “Don't accept everything you read or hear as total truth,” he said, adding that he would call on all involved parties to help with the investigation. The protesters, who included members of opposition parties and non-governmental organisations, gathered for some four hours and refused to disperse initially despite warnings from the police. They finally started to leave at 11.20am after Deputy OCPD (II) Supt Lai Yong Heng issued a stern warning. Perak Religious Department director Datuk Jamry Sury, who was present to monitor the situation, said the department would also investigate the incident. “We will take action against the culprit,” he added. Perak Pusat Khidmat Islam secretary Mohd Nazri Sahad said he was there to check if there was any truth to the message. The police were still on standby at the church last night. Father Fabian Dicom, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Penang, which covers Perak, said the church was extremely concerned that a group of people had been sowing ill-will through rumours. “We are concerned as to how others have come to believe these rumours,” he added. He noted that the incident had also infringed on the church members' right to worship. “The Catholic Church has always believed that dialogue is the best platform to resolve issues and as such is extremely disappointed that there was no attempt whatsoever for dialogue,” he said. < Previous | Home | Print Edition | Next > Copyright 1995-2006 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd
The Star Online: Print Edition < Previous | Home | Print Edition | Next > Monday November 6, 2006 Cops to probe baptism SMS By CHAN LI LEEN IPOH: The police are investigating a rumour which spread like wildfire through SMS, claiming that a group of Muslims will be baptised at a church here. As a result, a large crowd gathered at the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes in Silibin from 7.30am yesterday to protest against the alleged baptism only to find out that it was actually the first Holy Communion for 98 Indian children. State police chief Deputy Comm Datuk Aziz Bulat said the police would verify how the SMS had started. “There could be some people out there who have a personal agenda to create disharmony among the races,” he said when met at the church. DCP Aziz said the police had also received the text message and had, therefore, placed the Federal Reserve Unit on standby since 7am. He advised the public to be wary of such messages. “Don't accept everything you read or hear as total truth,” he said, adding that he would call on all involved parties to help with the investigation. The protesters, who included members of opposition parties and non-governmental organisations, gathered for some four hours and refused to disperse initially despite warnings from the police. They finally started to leave at 11.20am after Deputy OCPD (II) Supt Lai Yong Heng issued a stern warning. Perak Religious Department director Datuk Jamry Sury, who was present to monitor the situation, said the department would also investigate the incident. “We will take action against the culprit,” he added. Perak Pusat Khidmat Islam secretary Mohd Nazri Sahad said he was there to check if there was any truth to the message. The police were still on standby at the church last night. Father Fabian Dicom, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Penang, which covers Perak, said the church was extremely concerned that a group of people had been sowing ill-will through rumours. “We are concerned as to how others have come to believe these rumours,” he added. He noted that the incident had also infringed on the church members' right to worship. “The Catholic Church has always believed that dialogue is the best platform to resolve issues and as such is extremely disappointed that there was no attempt whatsoever for dialogue,” he said. < Previous | Home | Print Edition | Next > Copyright 1995-2006 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
What the Pope Actually Said
For those of you who are wondering just what the Pope actually said and how, when and where he said it, the full text of the speech is here, republished without any permission whatsoever from the copyright holder:
APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
TO MÜNCHEN, ALTÖTTING AND REGENSBURG
(SEPTEMBER 9-14, 2006)
MEETING WITH THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SCIENCE
LECTURE OF THE HOLY FATHER
Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg
Tuesday, 12 September 2006
Faith, Reason and the University
Memories and Reflections
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 (διάλεξις - 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, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, 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 (σὺν λόγω) 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 Hazm 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 Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, 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!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - 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 (cf. Ps 115). 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 Hazm 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 (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "λογικη λατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).
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.
***
NOTE:
The Holy Father intends to supply a subsequent version of this text, complete with footnotes. The present text must therefore be considered provisional.
© Copyright 2006 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana
APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
TO MÜNCHEN, ALTÖTTING AND REGENSBURG
(SEPTEMBER 9-14, 2006)
MEETING WITH THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SCIENCE
LECTURE OF THE HOLY FATHER
Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg
Tuesday, 12 September 2006
Faith, Reason and the University
Memories and Reflections
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 (διάλεξις - 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, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, 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 (σὺν λόγω) 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 Hazm 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 Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, 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!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - 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 (cf. Ps 115). 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 Hazm 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 (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "λογικη λατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).
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.
***
NOTE:
The Holy Father intends to supply a subsequent version of this text, complete with footnotes. The present text must therefore be considered provisional.
© Copyright 2006 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana
Saturday, September 16, 2006
The Pope should NOT apologize for his remarks
There has apparently been a chorus of criticism of the Pope over what many in the popular press - especially the Middle-Eastern Islamic popular press - have been saying are "anti-Islamic" remarks.
The Pope should not apologize.
The reason is very simple indeed: his remarks have been totally taken out of context and mis-interpreted. And, going by the manner in which the out-of-context misinterpretations have been consistently performed especially in Islamic countries, quite deliberately so.
The Islamists have twisted the Pope's speech for their own ends; they WANT a "clash of (religious) civilizations" to develop; they WANT inter-religious strife and violence on the planet; and they KNOW that they will win in either one of two ways: if they can force an apology for what are essentially unprovocative remarks, they demonstrate their power to force unreasonable concessions from those who do not agree with them, and reduce their enemies' credibility; alternatively, they can hope to increase their standing as defenders of their faith against "aggressive", "unrepentant" infidels, where their more moderate colleagues have kept quiet and refused to respond to "provocation".
Since either way the Pope gains no ground, he should not apologize. He should simply clarify what he said, and repeat that clarification ad infinitum. Violence, subtle persecution, discrimination, and propaganda warfare against Christians in countries with majority Muslim populations is endemic. It has not disappeared and will not disappear until the Second Coming. The Islamists would have used something - anything - else, as an excuse to keep the anti-Christian bigotry burning even if the Pope had never made his speech.
It will not be a coincidence that the Islamists will always try to make comparisons between the spread of Islam by the sword and the spread of Christianity by the sword.
What the Islamists don't want to emphasize is that they picked up the sciences, much of their technology and some of their art from pagans and infidels. Essentially, a backward tribe in the desert conquered and appropriated Byzantine architecture as their own (that's why the domes and minarets look so similar in Moscow, Constantinople and Mecca); inherited the Greeks' knowledge of the sciences and mathematics - these fields of knowledge were not introduced to the world by Islam, but preserved and in some respects improved upon for the use of future generations - and failed to invent much that can be claimed as entirely their own that is of relevance to daily survival in the modern world.
Christian missionaries, at least, brought disease-fighting medicine and surgical techniques to the Third World, albeit on the back of what was admittedly much White Man's Burden racist prejudice. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, basically all of the great social and scientific revolutions leading to the betterment of human society over the last 4 centuries - were Judeo-Christian, Euro- and North American-centric, not Islamic, in origin. These revolutions gave all of us residents of the modern world, Christian and non-Christian alike, such basic amenities as quick, motorized public transport and telecommunications, to name just 2 modern-day innovations that owe their existence to the very largely Christian, or at any rate non-Muslim, West. Now - this is going to sound inflammatory - but what has Islam given us modern-day Christians in return? I don't mean to bash, but it's time to stop making unfair comparisons. Christians took the Da Vinci Code reasonably well; it's time Muslims learnt to engage in rational debate and propaganda (as opposed to actual) warfare. It would do the world a whole lot of good.
END
The Pope should not apologize.
The reason is very simple indeed: his remarks have been totally taken out of context and mis-interpreted. And, going by the manner in which the out-of-context misinterpretations have been consistently performed especially in Islamic countries, quite deliberately so.
The Islamists have twisted the Pope's speech for their own ends; they WANT a "clash of (religious) civilizations" to develop; they WANT inter-religious strife and violence on the planet; and they KNOW that they will win in either one of two ways: if they can force an apology for what are essentially unprovocative remarks, they demonstrate their power to force unreasonable concessions from those who do not agree with them, and reduce their enemies' credibility; alternatively, they can hope to increase their standing as defenders of their faith against "aggressive", "unrepentant" infidels, where their more moderate colleagues have kept quiet and refused to respond to "provocation".
Since either way the Pope gains no ground, he should not apologize. He should simply clarify what he said, and repeat that clarification ad infinitum. Violence, subtle persecution, discrimination, and propaganda warfare against Christians in countries with majority Muslim populations is endemic. It has not disappeared and will not disappear until the Second Coming. The Islamists would have used something - anything - else, as an excuse to keep the anti-Christian bigotry burning even if the Pope had never made his speech.
It will not be a coincidence that the Islamists will always try to make comparisons between the spread of Islam by the sword and the spread of Christianity by the sword.
What the Islamists don't want to emphasize is that they picked up the sciences, much of their technology and some of their art from pagans and infidels. Essentially, a backward tribe in the desert conquered and appropriated Byzantine architecture as their own (that's why the domes and minarets look so similar in Moscow, Constantinople and Mecca); inherited the Greeks' knowledge of the sciences and mathematics - these fields of knowledge were not introduced to the world by Islam, but preserved and in some respects improved upon for the use of future generations - and failed to invent much that can be claimed as entirely their own that is of relevance to daily survival in the modern world.
Christian missionaries, at least, brought disease-fighting medicine and surgical techniques to the Third World, albeit on the back of what was admittedly much White Man's Burden racist prejudice. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, basically all of the great social and scientific revolutions leading to the betterment of human society over the last 4 centuries - were Judeo-Christian, Euro- and North American-centric, not Islamic, in origin. These revolutions gave all of us residents of the modern world, Christian and non-Christian alike, such basic amenities as quick, motorized public transport and telecommunications, to name just 2 modern-day innovations that owe their existence to the very largely Christian, or at any rate non-Muslim, West. Now - this is going to sound inflammatory - but what has Islam given us modern-day Christians in return? I don't mean to bash, but it's time to stop making unfair comparisons. Christians took the Da Vinci Code reasonably well; it's time Muslims learnt to engage in rational debate and propaganda (as opposed to actual) warfare. It would do the world a whole lot of good.
END
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