Benedict XVI

Rediscovering the Breadth
of Reason
This is the challenge the Pope set forth in his address at the University of Regensburg, a speech that was attacked by Islamic spheres as much as it was ignored by a great part of the Western intellectual world, which pretended not to hear. The words of Benedict XVI expressed a courageous act of respect for reason, which has been “imprisoned” for too long, an appeal to recover its correct use, and a testimony to the reasonableness of the Catholic faith. The encounter with the Christian Fact provokes reason to leave the prison it is continually tempted to lock itself in. The following pages offer contributions from Pigi Colognesi, and Javier Prades

by Pigi Colognesi

“Professor, there’s no use your coming here to talk about religion,” Fr. Giussani was told at the beginning of his first hour of lessons in 1954. “Why in the world not?” “Because to talk, you have to reason; you have to use your reason. Using reason when dealing with faith is useless, because they are two separate lines, and will never intersect–reason says one thing and faith another. They’re two different worlds!” As far back as that early, still implicit, beginning of CL, it was clear that the true question for Christianity of our times is not primarily the faith, but the conception of reason. It wasn’t by chance that the Meeting of Rimini 2006 made reason its central focus.
So then, let’s take our time and study attentively the splendid hymn to reason that was Benedict XVI’s address to the University of Regensburg on September 12th.
These words are certainly not intended as a summary, much less a commentary. Just a few highlights so that the least possible is lost, and we can later do our best to dig through the texts of our history in search of reverberations and clarifications.
A few premises are called for. The first obviously concerns the enormous uproar aroused by the remote-controlled reactions of the part of the Islamic world that considered itself offended by the by-now famous quotes of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II. As we are going to press, the controversy is far from over, and it is impossible to imagine how it will develop. In this setting, it is enough to refer readers to our press release, “We stand by the Pope,” and to remind them that the judgment on Islam was not the central theme of the Pope’s address.
It is similarly important to clear the field of other, subtler, but not less dangerous reductions. It is only an academic lesson: by separating the theologian from the Pope, one fails to reckon with his challenging message with due seriousness. It is a difficult talk, addressed to philosophers. In reality, the Pope’s line of reasoning is crystalline. Those with the specific competency will offer the appropriate in-depth analyses, but the substance is accessible–and important–for every Christian.
So then, let’s go to our highlighted passages.

The university
Addressing an academic audience, Benedict XVI wanted to introduce the main topic–the harmony between faith and reason–precisely with a judgment on what the university should be: the place where, beyond specializations, each member works “in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects,” constituting in this way a universitas. The university, however, seems to have rejected this “universality,” not so much because of the multiplication of specific competencies, but due to the imposition–as we will see later in his address–of a reduced conception of reason, a reason that no longer seeks the whole, but settles for cultivating little specialistic gardens. This, however, is no longer reason; it is only a partial fragment of it.

The nature of God
In this passage (the one that inflamed the Islamic streets), the central phrase–according to Benedict XVI himself–goes like this: “Not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.” Why is it so important? First of all, because it condemns all “pathological” violence in the use of religion. But, above all, because it indicates the possibility of human reason–when correctly used–to “discover” God. In fact, entering into relationship with reality, reason is pushed by its own nature to ask itself about meaning, to read reality itself as a “sign” of the Mystery of God. This dynamic, the “dynamic of the sign,” would be unworkable if between our reason and God’s action there weren’t an “analogy.” In other words, precisely because God, who is “absolutely transcendent,” is at the same time present in reality–and thus is not entirely separate–our reason can grasp His existence. Certainly, the face of Mystery remains mysterious for our reason. Faith buds, in fact, like an unexpected flower (the very revelation of God) on the branch of a reason that is not reduced. To indicate this capacity of human reason, Benedict XVI uses the courageous term “genuine enlightenment”–as if to say that our Western culture, which vaunts itself as reasonable because it has rejected God, is anything but enlightened.

The Greek spirit
The awareness that “between God and us, between His eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason, there exists a real analogy” has always been a patrimony of the Church. In her early years, she found signs of it in the best Greek philosophy, so much so that Saint John begins his Gospel calling God logos, that is, not just word, but also reason. Was this meeting of Christian revelation and the Greek spirit just casual, and thus to be overcome, or is it essential and constant? Benedict XVI forcefully espoused the latter, not because he “prefers” the Greek spirit, but precisely in consideration of the nature of the Incarnation. In fact, it always is realized through particular concrete forms. Once assumed, these forms cannot be considered casual, but in some way constitute the very face of the Incarnation (certainly not all, and not all in the same way). But surely, the discovery of God as logos is not a “Greek superstructure” of the Incarnation; rather, it is its fundamental element, so much so that the Gospel itself makes it unequivocally its own. One can’t help but recall, as an example of this dynamic, the dialectic between the human factor and the divine factor developed in Giussani’s Why the Church?

Dehellenization
The term may seem difficult, but the substance is clear: when faith is separated from reason (with the pretext of shaking off Greek “rationalism”), the nature of Christianity is radically changed. Benedict XVI gives three examples. The first is the Protestant Reformation, which ended up leading to the separation between “pure” reason, where the problem of God cannot even be posed, and “practical” reason, where faith enters only in moral terms, in terms of life practices. An analogous conclusion is reached by the second dehellenization, which, in searching for the historical Christ only in documents, makes Him merely “the father of a humanitarian moral message.” Finally, there is the current dehellenization, which says that the Christianity received by the European tradition would not be good for the peoples beyond the old continent. This is not pure analysis of cultural history. Just think of the fact that the faith not conceived of as a gratuitous and unforeseeable response to the exigency of reason (which is common to all men, and only on this basis can dialogue be founded) ends up reducing it to moralism (the prevalence of ethics over ontology) or generic humanitarianism. And without the certainty that faith responds to the heart/reason of every man, mission is effectively impossible (and, in fact, some theologians theorize that it is even harmful).

Scientism
If reason has no “analogy” with the Mystery of God, the questions about God–that is, about meaning–cannot be asked and one is forced to give value exclusively to scientific rationality. That is to say that man can reach certainties only in the spheres that, deep down, interest him the least, since those that concern meaning are precisely the ones excluded. It is a reason reduced to a closed room. In contrast, reason is really a window thrown wide open, the window from which God, who has made us similar to Himself, lets Himself be glimpsed as Mystery. In such a journey of inexhaustible searching for meaning, reason, with methods proper to each object it encounters, reads reality and discovers its dynamics–that is, conducts real science.