The Pope of Reason

I discussed the recent (and ongoing) flap over The Pope and Islam in my previous post. Last September, when Pope Benedict XVI addressed the "representatives of science" at the University of Regensburg, Germany, much umbrage was taken at some of his references to Islam. The Holy Father mentioned a dialogue between a Byzantine Christian emperor and an educated Persian Muslim during the siege of Constantinople (the city once called Byzantium) between 1394 and 1402. The thrust of one of the remarks made by Manuel II Paleologus, the emperor, was to note that Mohammed's command in the Qur'an had been to spread his new religion "by the sword" — that is, by force and compulsion, not by reason and persuasion.

What got overlooked in the hubbub over that seeming derogation of Islam was that the Pope also noted the injunction of surah 2,256 of the Qur'an: "There is no compulsion in religion."

(The prepared text of the Pope's Regensburg lecture can be read here, or in PDF format here. The Wikipedia article on it and the controversy it ignited is here.)


The Pope also cited a modern scholar of Islam named Theodore Khoury to the effect that "for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality."

Again, what got overlooked was that Pope Benedict's speech expounded how our own Judeo-Christian tradition in the West has, since the late Middle Ages, toyed with similar notions of God not being bound, at the very core of his being, by reason ... or anything else.

The Pope said this image of God as voluntarily having put on a mask of reason as his modus operandi toward Creation, even though there was nothing in his own nature which mandated that choice, was the start of a project — it continues today — to "dehellenize" Christian thought.

Ancient Greek philosophers held that God (albeit not the God of the Old Testament) was intrinsically rational, as was the world which they investigated and experienced. They referred to the orderliness of the universe as cosmos and the principle behind it as logos. Benedict feels that such Greek ideas were part and parcel of the message of the New Testament, right from the start of the Christian Church.

As such, they were not just "a preliminary inculturation" which grafted Hellenic notions onto Jewish ones in order to make Christianity palatable as it was transplanted from the Middle East to ancient Europe. When the Evangelist, writing in Greek, began the Gospel of John with a reference to the Creator God as logos, Word, reason — using "In the beginning" to mirror the first verse of Genesis — he gave Manuel II Paleologus every right to say 13 centuries later that not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's very nature.


I need to make a confession before I proceed any further. Upon reading the Pope's Regensburg lecture, I found myself realizing just how long and how deeply I have been in love with that philosophical project to dehellenize Christian understanding. I couldn't have called it by that name, but virtually every point the Holy Father made about how the dehellenizing of theology has proceeded during the last several centuries rang a bell with me. I'll discuss these points one by one in future posts; for now, let me just say that I stand convicted of having long been a dehellenizer par excellence.

And yet I also recognized, as I read the Pope's text, that I am in some deep sense no longer the dehellenizer I once was. In fact, my biases today are all in the opposite direction: toward reinstating the primacy of reason as the best — nay, only — way to tame the rampant craziness we find ourselves confronted with in today's world.


It's possible to say I'm wrong in all this, and that the Pope's emphasis on reason as indivisible from Christian faith (and vice versa) is actually the exact opposite of the apt prescription for the West today. Such a position is a coherent one as well. That I myself have upheld it with a fair degree of consistency — until now, that is — makes me sure of that.

What we have here, in the Pope's position on rationality as it diverges from the "modern" view of same, is a conflict of two worldviews that differ at a tremendously deep level of abstraction. Great minds — the Pope mentions, among others, that of Immanuel Kant — have for the past several centuries pondered such deep thoughts and come to the conclusion that ancient Greek approaches to rationality no longer make sense as the linchpin of modern philosophical understanding.


The Greeks' basic assumptions lasted in the West until at least the time of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century — perhaps for the very reason that they underpin Biblical assumptions in holy writ. Then, according to the Pope, Thomas' near-contemporary Duns Scotus contradicted Aquinas with respect to "the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done." Specifically, said Scotus, God acts in accord with reason only by virtue of a voluntary choice made on his part, not because of his true nature.

The Reformation, in the 16th century, "sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word," the Pope asserted at Regensburg, ignoring the fact that Word and logos are the same thing in John's Gospel. "When Kant [in the 18th century] 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." That was the culmination of the first stage of the modern dehellenization project which Scotus' "voluntarism" had made possible.

The second stage, Benedict said, involved an initiative 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." The New Testament was re-interpreted in such a way as to make of Jesus but a man with a "simple message ... [albeit] a humanitarian moral message." Theology became "something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific," meaning it was no longer joined at the hip with reason. Accordingly, reason no longer took primacy over historical relativism or scientific empiricism.

In an age of science, according to the Pope, "only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield decisive certainty." This approach to the truth left God outside its available radius. It concomitantly dethroned reason, as the Greeks understood the word, as a source of knowledge. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, followed by his Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgement, were instrumental in making reason serve as a "practical" tool rather than a pathway to higher truth.

Even so, the Pope says a kind of back-door Platonism, derived from Greek thought, has continued to inform the modern scientific view. Taking the form of Cartesianism, it "presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently."


Lost in the modernist shuffle, unfortunately, has been the idea that every human possesses a soul whose nature is fundamentally rational, and is thus analogous to God's own inner nature. Instead, another analogy, to the voluntarism of Scotus, has made each of us free agents for whom both reason and religious faith are matters of subjective choice, or of personal "conscience." (The quotation marks here are the Pope's.) Sadly, the Pope said, "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' ... and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective."

The Pope, in fact, would like to reinstate "collective reason" as the touchstone of our common life together in a globalized world, in place of the merely personal and subjective. His hope is that the remnant of back-door Platonism that lingers in our scientific worldview — the idea that the world has a fundamentally "mathematical structure" — could become the basis for expanding the sphere of rationality to encompass, once again, the domain of the human spirit.

"Modern scientific reason," he says, "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 ... ." Translation: nature is rational. So is the human spirit, at its very best ... and so too is the God of the Bible, properly interpreted, with all of scripture's hellenistic allusions still intact. Embracing the rich analogies between those three levels of understanding could propel the West into a newer, greater age.


More than that, it could serve as the basis for real interreligious dialogue with Islam. Before we can challenge Islam to take its "There is no compulsion in religion" mandate more seriously, we had better get straight in our own heads the extent to which we have marginalized reason in our own culture.

The guiding principle of this blog has always been a search for solidarity, by which I mean a coming together of all the disparate worldviews that do battle amongst us today. When I began the blog, I originally called it "A World of Doubt," in view of the fact that there is a culture war going on in America today between (at the extremes) those who claim their religion is definitely true and those who assert that there is no God and that all religions are false. Given that both sides speak with the swagger of certainty, I wanted to explore the possibility that "doubt" — a resolute openmindedness — was a viable middle position that could keep things from flying apart.

At some point I replaced "doubt" with "solidarity" as my goal of goals: seeing whether we all might be able to come together over a stripped-down understanding of religion or, at least, of the Christian one. (Along these lines, see also my now-defunct Jesus before Christianity blog.) I now recognize this paring down to have been an attempt to justify a dehellenized faith of the sort the Pope warned against at Regensburg: a simple, humanitarian message of "love thy neighbor," perhaps.

Today I see that simplifying the message isn't enough. Any formula such as "love thy neighbor," no matter how simplistic, is ineluctably perceived in its relationship to a wider context of thought. For us moderns today, that wider context demotes reason as a fount of truth and replaces it with subjectivity. If the Pope is right about his recognition of that — and I suddenly think he is — then loving your neighbor means little more than rationalizing the gulf between his world and yours as being dictated by the strictures of multiculturalism, or tolerance, or whatever.

But that can't be right, I now see. If he is living in a wholly different world, experientially speaking, then you and he are not really neighbors at all. In that case, the only way to build a bridge between your world and his is by the mutual exercise of reason.

That was the thrust of the Pope's Regensburg lecture. The point was not that Christianity is good, because rational, and Islam bad, because not. The point was not that Christianity and Islam cannot talk, period. It was rather that both religions must re-embrace reason before interreligious dialogue can flower and bear fruit.