Is the Pope on any Jihadist hit list yet?

Thanks for the good piece. Try:

Muslims Offended by an Inconvenient Truth
http://www.rightlinx.com/?p=208

Here is the Pope's Lecture in full:

Meeting with the representatives of science at the University of Regensburg

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 (*4V8,>4H - 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 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
(F× 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 Hazn
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 8`(@H". This is the very word used by the emperor: God
acts, F× 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 Hazn 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 - "8@(46¬
8"JD,\"", 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

Thanks for that James.

It is clear that the Pope was encouraging dialogue, when what he got in return has been nothing but the same old, constant ready-state, knee jerk, outrage from much, but not all, of the Muslim community.

The problem is that those Muslims that understand and believe that violence and religion are a poor mix, are not speaking out.

The era of Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus was discuused in a recent blog at Keshertalk

Michael: I was referring to the existence of cults of Mary in the Middle Ages and the paganism thereof. When the Byzantines defended Constantinople against the Turks in 1453, they carried an Icon of Mary around the walls of the city. That is paganism, not Jewish, nor philosophical.

Robert Schwartz | September 3, 2006 02:47 PM

Robert: That is an evocative example. I think you have to see it in context, face death or injury as a soldier with equanimity as Your Savior as seen in his mother. The second most common prayer in Catholic practice is the Hail Mary which concludes with 'Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.'

Back to this blog. Thanks for the whole text of the Pope's address. "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman." It would be some surcease from the current troubles to have "I Manuel II Paleologus," the movie.

Rodger,
Regarding the Pope being on a Jihadi hit list yet, the answer is yes, and although I don't have any sources to link to, I've seen chat on doubts that this Pope will survive very long, given the climate of the Muslim world and its propensity for terror and murder.