Document - Regensburg, one year later

The Legacy of the Logos
The famous speech in which Benedict XVI urged us to “broaden reason” was also notable for the way it presented the relationship between Christianity and the Greek tradition.
A talk given by a Ph.D. student from Princeton at the summer retreat of the Memores Domini explored precisely this aspect of the Pope’s speech. We present it here as a contribution to method, as a way of taking up the thread of a work to which we are all called

by Luca Grillo

“In the beginning was the Logos... and the Logos was made flesh.” John’s opening words announce the Christian event, born, as Pope Benedict emphasizes, from “the encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought.” The first verse of the Gospel recalls the verse which opens the Bible: “In the beginning, when God created...” With these words, John suggests that Christianity is grafted onto the trajectory of the Bible and specifically that God is Logos–namely, reason. What does this mean? Where is this evident in the Bible? One example is the dialogue between Abraham and Yahweh, who wishes to destroy Sodom.
“Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city?” asks Abraham. “If I find fifty innocent people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” “What if there are five less than fifty innocent people? Will you destroy the whole city because of those five?”
Abraham negotiates successfully until he brings God down to ten. God is omnipotent and unpredictable, but Abraham believes it is unjust to destroy a whole city while there are still some innocent inhabitants. Somehow, he realizes that there is something in common between his own conception of justice and God’s. The people of Israel were just like us: they were tempted to reduce the insight that God is Logos to their own scale of values, and so kept complaining that He was omnipotent and unpredictable.

The Gospel
and Greek thought
John, at any rate, wrote in Greek, and the opening verse of his Gospel contains significant echoes of Greek culture. Logos also means “word.” It is reason that enables men to communicate and it manifests itself as speech. Animals lack speech because they lack reason. God is Logos, meaning He can reveal Himself to mankind. The Greek philosophers used reason to investigate reality, confident that reality could be known, and that God, the ultimate substance of all things, could be investigated by reason. In particular, Greek philosophy was born as the search for the beginning, the arché–not just the chronological beginning, but the substance out of which everything was made. The Greeks intuited that reason could and should explore this question and that this arché, of which everything was made, was necessarily one origin. So it is significant that John begins by stating, “In the beginning was the Word.” In other words, John presents Christianity as a historical fact that completes the trajectory of the Bible and gives an answer to the question that gave rise to Greek philosophy.
But the Pope speaks of a precise time, the Hellenistic period, when biblical faith encountered the best of Greek thought–“a meeting between faith and reason,” which he describes as an “intrinsic necessity.” Why Hellenism? In the third century BC, the Jews translated the Bible into Greek to sanction the encounter between these two cultures. According to ancient tradition, the Pharaoh Ptolemy Philadelphus founded a great library, bringing books from all over the world to be catalogued and translated. He wanted the Bible to be among them. So he sent messengers to Jerusalem, where each of the twelve tribes of Israel chose six learned men, and these seventy-two experts travelled to Alexandria. Living in seclusion on the island of Pharos, each of them worked on his own translation without any deadline for completing the work. Mysteriously, after seventy days, each independently presented his completed translation. When the Pharaoh compared the seventy-two versions to choose the best, to his surprise he found they were all exactly the same! This legend is significant because, being very ancient (second century BC), it shows that the Greeks and Jews themselves considered this translation as willed by God; therefore, the word of the seventy was authoritative.
So Christianity also completed this third trajectory: the rapprochement between Hellenistic and Jewish culture.

Dehellenization and its reductions
Christianity was born in this way, at a precise time and place. The Pope observes that “the Greek heritage forms an integral part of the Christian faith.” The fundamental decisions about the relationship between faith and reason form part of faith itself. If we discard this Greek heritage, we lose a substantial part of Christianity, which is out of the question.
Dehellenization is a quest for a pure faith and the original Jesus, unaffected by Greek philosophical categories which, it is claimed, are alien to it. The principle underlying this position seems good, as if to say, “John, a Jew, lived in a city of Hellenic culture, so in talking about his experience he would naturally use words, images, and categories from the Jewish or Greek tradition. But I am neither Greek nor Jewish and I was born two thousand years later. So I have to seek the pure Jesus, to scrape away the Greek accretions and relate it to the present to find the Jesus for today.” It sounds like a noble effort, but the Pope, stimulated in his logic, shows that it always leads to a reduction of reason (and hence of man), compromising our ability to encounter Jesus. In the name of a pure Jesus, we lose Jesus.
The second part of the Pope’s speech at Regensburg retraced the steps in the history of philosophy that have led to three large reductions.
The first stage of dehellenization, the Pope explains, began with the Protestant Reformation and culminated in Kant, the philosopher who said, “I need to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith.” Faith and reason are not just dissociated–Kant actually thought setting aside reason was a help to faith. So what is faith? Something you feel. “I don’t feel it any more, so I don’t believe any more,” many people say nowadays. In fact, if I don’t feel it, it doesn’t exist. But if reason does not serve to explore the Mystery, what’s the use of it? In the second stage, philosophy affirms that reason serves for the empirical, mathematical sciences, because only what is demonstrable is reasonable. “Jesus? Prove it! If you can’t, I won’t believe; in fact, I’ll accuse you who believe of being unreasonable.” Many people today claim they cannot be certain of Jesus. The third stage culminates logically in “cultural pluralism,” meaning that there is no such thing as truth; each of us believes whatever we choose, and we have to respect all opinions. Hence, the affirmation of an absolute truth is perceived as an act of violence.
Clearly, the problem is not with the Greeks. Rather, what is at issue is a concept of reason that either enables us to encounter reality, and therefore Christ, or prevents us from doing so. Dehellenization limits reason before launching into the great search. These are not philosophical subtleties for experts, but three cultural positions that we have to contend with. The result is that, in our quest for Jesus, we often ask ourselves questions like: “Do I feel it?” “Prove it to me.” Or we say, “Jesus for me is...”
The Pope’s words are literally just what Fr. Giussani taught us for years. The “perCorso” begins with The Religious Sense. Before speaking of Jesus, he teaches us that reason is not reducible to logic or what can be demonstrated. It is worth rereading the Pope’s historical outline together with The Religious Awareness of Modern Man–the similarities are astonishing. For example, Fr. Giussani teaches that “the Church is an aid for those who want to attain certainty on the problem of Jesus.” He indicates three different approaches, of which two are limited. The first, the “Protestant” approach, reduces Christianity to inner illumination (“I feel it”); the second, the “rationalist,” seeks the historical Jesus (“Prove it!”). And rationalism (Giussani cites Schweitzer) expires in “cultural pluralism,” because the historical Jesus eludes us in a distant past. The Pope and Fr. Giussani teach us the same thing, pointing out the risks of an ossified reason that prevents us from understanding reality. We should ask ourselves whether dehellenization, which may look like an interesting new departure, is not based on an erroneous principle. The quest for the pure Jesus is a contradiction in terms. Jesus is God incarnate. Fr. Giussani taught us this with the example of gold in the dirt. Gold in the pure state does not exist, but when we really want gold, we’re willing to brave mud and dirt for the sake of finding a nugget.

The great Greek inheritance
Eliminating the Greeks violates the origins of the Christian fact and places serious limits on reason. But what did the Greeks teach us? Why did the Pope speak of the best of Greek thought as a constituent part of Christianity?
In the first place, the Greeks had a conception of reason as covering a wide range. The logos can investigate various aspects of reality by adopting different methods. This opening flowered in the fifth century BC and spread in Hellenism. In the fifth century, the logos expanded, interesting itself in everything. It refined Democracy, with Clisthenes and Pericles; instituted a new historical method, with Herodotus and Thucydides: and founded a new school of medicine with Hippocrates. In the fifth-century drama, tragedy subjected the beliefs inherited from mythology to the sieve of reason. And, again in the fifth century, the typically Greek passion for beauty produced great monuments, like the Parthenon.
The Parthenon, a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena on the Acropolis, symbolized the typically Greek quest for beauty and was another expression of the human logos. When, after its destruction, the archeologists sought to reassemble it, they realized with surprise that it was a difficult undertaking. The pieces were all different. They discovered that the columns were all of different lengths, because the pedestals on which they rested were slightly higher in the center; and those at the corners of the building were not set parallel with the others nor precisely perpendicular to the ground, but slightly inclined toward the inside. If one traces the lines of the column, the four lines that start from the corners of the Parthenon would meet about half a mile above ground level. Optical studies had shown the Greeks that this difference of a few tenths of an inch would appear as perfect harmony. This means that they could not have built the pieces all to the same model. Each piece differs by a few tenths of an inch from the others. In short, the logos discovered different approaches to reality–through history, medicine, politics, philosophy, literature, or architecture. It was a very supple use of reason. The Parthenon is an example of the passionate openness of the Greek logos.
This conception of reason spread with Hellenism, the period that begins in 322 BC with the death of Alexander the Great, whose conquests extended the boundaries of the Greek world. It then became clear that the logos unites all mankind: foreigners, women, slaves, and children entered art and literature. The logos, reason and word, also led to a dialogue with other cultures, as shown by the translation of the Bible.
For the Greeks, reason necessarily entailed the quest for the meaning of life. The Pope quotes from Plato’s Phaedo: “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.” But the Greeks also understood that the logos was inadequate. “It seems to me, O Socrates, and perhaps also to you, that reliable truth [on the meaning of life] is difficult to attain.”
Here lies the drama: man is a seeker, but the ultimate meaning eludes his search. What is to be done? Plato advises us to cling to the best argument, “and on this, as on a raft, to attempt to cross the sea.” Plato uses a rare word for raft, schedia, used in the Odyssey for the makeshift raft used by Ulysses when he suffers shipwreck. Like a raft adrift on the ocean, reason undertakes a noble attempt and yet is inadequate. “Unless,” continues Plato, “he can cross the sea with some safer craft, with the help of the word revealed by a god.” The Greek for a “word revealed by a god” is logos–a prophetic perception that the logos, reason, can be communicated by becoming the word.
In conclusion, on the great plain where architects and engineers built a bridge to the stars, to meaning, the best builders were the Greeks. They trusted to that reason which enabled them to know and love much of reality. Yet they had the honesty to admit that reason remained inadequate, like a raft on the ocean. In Athens, Paul drew on this aspect of the Greek quest, proclaiming, “What you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you.” Christianity was born in history out of the meeting between the human logos, which, as logos, cannot help seeking but, as human, invariably loses its way, and the Divine Logos, which, as Logos, can be recognized and, as Divine, seeks to communicate itself.
The hearts of friends and colleagues, like my own, are begging for Christ–a noble quest, but the human logos is inadequate. For this reason, the Divine Logos has compassion on us and communicates itself. So, just as John and Andrew encountered Christ, so too can you and I. Christianity is the encounter between man’s heart, which begs for Christ, and Christ, who begs us for our hearts.