The Blessed Balance Between Reason and Religion

The choice of the regnal name Benedict, which in Latin means “the blessed,” is significant. Pope Benedict XVI carefully chose his name (which means ‘the blessed’):

Filled with sentiments of awe and thanksgiving, I wish to speak of why I chose the name Benedict. Firstly, I remember Pope Benedict XV, that courageous prophet of peace, who guided the Church through turbulent times of war. In his footsteps I place my ministry in the service of reconciliation and harmony between peoples. Additionally, I recall Saint Benedict of Nursia, co-patron of Europe, whose life evokes the Christian roots of Europe. I ask him to help us all to hold firm to the centrality of Christ in our Christian life: May Christ always take first place in our thoughts and actions!

Recalling this his recent words about Islam might seem strange although there has been some criticism to earlier remarks as well. The relationship between the Catholic Church and Islam is an important challenge and the Pope set out to stimulate the dialogue between the two. His recent remarks in a speech he delivered in Regensburg (read HERE) ‘Faith, Reason and the University. Memories and Reflections’ caused quite a stir. Most of the time, his speech is summarized like this:

In a lecture in Germany on Tuesday, the Pope quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor who wrote that the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) had brought things “only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”.

Benedict made the comment during an appeal to Muslims to join a dialogue of cultures that agrees the concept of Islamic “holy war” is unreasonable and against God’s nature.

We can be really ignorant and state that:

Moslem commentators aren’t interested in the rest of the Pope’s speech about rationality as against voluntarism, about Kant and Harnack, and inculturation.

And then, the pot calling the kettel black, go on about:

debate about the nature of Islam, and the danger of a faith that opposes reason and believes that ‘Allah sent Mohammed with the true religion so that it should rule over all the religions.’

.

Let’s have a look instead to what the Pope really said:

The dialogue [between Islam and Christendom, MdK] 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×< 8`(T) 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 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.

Ok, he stresses the relevance of reason and that violences is contradictory to reason. Nothing wrong with that and I think that is the core of his argument. As Juan Cole already made clear, he is wrong about Sura 2:256: ‘There is no compulsion in religion’. This is not a sura from the early (Mecca) period but it is a Medinah Sura; a Sura from after the Hijra (although parts of Sura al-baqara might be from the Mecca period). He wasn’t powerless and under threat then.

With regard to the concept of reason, Cole also points to the Mu’tazilite. Although there is a tendency to claim that ethics can only be derived from God and not from reason, but for example one of THE main Sunni scholars Al Ghazali has stated that

that reason can serve as a connection between the devout and God.

…thereby trying to create a balance between reason and religion. Besides Ibn Rushd (Averoes) there are also contemporary writers who advocate the importance of reason such as Soroush. So although there is some truth in Benedicts claims about reason and Islam, he is wrong for a large part. But he also criticizes the modern convictions about reason.

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.

[…]

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.

I guess the latter part is not so far from some Muslim traditions. And he continues saying:

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.

So what is this all about? It is not about condemning Jihad, it is not about the balance between reason and faith that according to the Pope (and there he is wrong) only Christians have, or the supposedly intolerance of islam but it might be an advice for the faithful, or the less faithful. It’s an advice not to throw away religion nor reason, but to find a balance between both. The rejections in the Muslim world are understandable and of course the crusade-argument hits him back already as well as accusations of Islamophobia and references to his Hitlerjugend-past. But would he really have forgotten that, or would it be one of the reasons he says these things? It is not smart of this Pope and there are reasons to question his ideas about this dialogue between Muslims and Catholics, and he should hire better informants. Maybe when he is in Turkey, he can deliver a new speech on the balance of religion and reason, but this could also turn out to be just the opposite.