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.

The Pope and Islam

One of the things that concern me as a Catholic today is what Pope Benedict XVI has said and done with respect to Islam. This is the topic of a recent article by Jane Kramer in The New Yorker. Even more recently, the Catholic writer George Weigel published this article, also available here, taking Ms. Kramer and the magazine editors to task for factual inaccuracies and "tendentious mis-readings of documents."

The Pope was criticized by many last September for, in a speech at the University of Regensburg in Germany, citing "a question posed by a fourteenth century Byzantine emperor to a Persian guest at his winter barracks near Ankara. 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new,' the emperor asked the Persian, 'and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached'.” What he meant by dredging this quote up was hard to discover, but it apparently had to do with the Pope's feeling that Islam is not part of “the Western rational tradition.”

(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.)


I read the Kramer piece, which was generally hostile to Benedict XVI, with much puzzlement. It stemmed, I realized, from my own lack of understanding of the basic issue. The latter, if my shaky comprehension is to be believed, seems to revolve around a claim which the Pope supposedly is making to the effect that interreligious dialogue between Christians and Muslims will fail. Why? Because reason and rationalism are at the base of Christian understanding, historically, and are not equally fundamental to the Muslim worldview.

“In Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories — even that of rationality," the Pope apparently said at Regensburg.

I find my own personal knowledge base about the place of reason in Islam to be wholly inadequate to judging the Pope's claim, which is accordingly difficult for me to fathom the intent of. I admit to all that right up front.


Mr. Weigel's response to the Kramer article is of some help here, but not a lot. My fault, not his — it's essentially an op-ed piece, not a doctoral dissertation. And it's more about the hasty, error-prone judgmentalism of the secular press toward the Pope than about the basic issues at hand.

Still, I gain some insight when Mr. Weigel writes in rebuttal of

... Ms. Kramer’s bugbear about reason-and-faith. Classical ideas of reason have a privileged place in Christian theology, not because of xenophobia (“Ratzinger is Eurocentric. To him, Europe means Christianity.”) but because the conviction that human beings can know that some things are true is essential in a Church whose Lord taught that the truth is liberating. Doctrine is not excess baggage on the journey of faith. It’s the vehicle that makes the journey possible.

This comes in the wake of Mr. Weigel's umbrage at Ms. Kramer's

... brusque dismissal, without serious examination, of Benedict XVI's suggestion that the first inculturation of Christianity in the world of classical rationality was providential, because it gave early Christians the intellectual tools to turn their evangelical confession of faith (“Jesus is Lord”) into doctrine and creeds ...

"As for the issues put on the global table at Regensburg," Mr. Weigel adds, "does Ms. Kramer really think it a bad thing to challenge irrational forms of faith that command the murder of innocents in the name of God? Is it wrong to suggest that there is danger in the obverse of irrational faith: that trouble is afoot in the West’s loss of faith in reason, which erodes our capacity to defend the universality of human rights and the superiority of the rule of law over the rule of coercion?"

That's admittedly a bit hard for me to parse. I think Mr. Weigel is suggesting that we in the West today court an error which is the polar opposite of Islam's supposed tone-deafness to rational thought, namely, the decay of our capacity to discover and uphold truth when it conflicts with our other, less moderate inclinations.


Why does the Pope find Islam anti-rational? According to Ms. Kramer, "it was at Regensburg's theology department that he [as Joseph Ratzinger] honed his belief that the discourse of Christianity is a fundamentally rational discourse — as the West, grounded in Greek philosophical inquiry, understands reason — and as such not ultimately comprehensible, even for argument’s sake, outside the Judeo-Christian tradition." Benedict XVI apparently deems Islam at base unintelligible because it does not seek to know God's will preeminently through rational inquiry.

Again, I simply have no basis on which to evaluate such a claim of Islam's fundamental irrationality, if that is indeed what the Pope is claiming.

I do understand and sympathize, though, with one of Mr. Weigel's constant themes, "the conviction that human beings can know that some things are true," as he puts it in this article. The knowability of truth, the firmness of it, the impregnability of truth to relativistic thought, the fact that truth and love are synonyms of God — Mr. Weigel talks about these ideas often. "Truth and Love are, if you will, two 'names' for God as Christianity understands God," he says in this interview.


What I'm skeptical about is the ability of reason to know all truth.

The way I see it, reason is a system by which we develop confidence in the truth of propositions derivedfrom a set of original, taken-on-faith suppositions by the application of rules of logic. All the derivable propositions are supposed to form an intelligible, coherent whole. But as I discuss in The Incompleteness of Provability and the other posts in my "Strange Loops" series about Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, there seem inescapably to be truths that we cannot know without standing outside such formal systems of proof.

The mathematician Kurt Gödel was able in 1931 to find a way to prove the incompleteness of provability, using full mathematical rigor, Hofstadter shows. I wonder if the Pope's commitment to rationalism as the high road to truth might not stumble badly over Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.


A homely example of what I mean concerns a TV set I once owned. Back around 1990 I bought an expensive TV that contained what was at the time a novelty: digital picture-enhancement circuitry. After a year of use it started doing odd things. Instead of giving me a normal picture, after it had warmed up fully it would suddenly start showing what looked like a negative color photographic image, except that the result was weirder and more psychedelic even than that.

I knew enough about digital circuitry to know that the fault could well be due to a single signal line "flipping" from 1 to 0, or vice versa — or, possibly, simply "floating" without any definite value whatever. That changed the internal "logic" of the circuitry. Where the picture was originally meant to be one thing, it was now another.

But, given the altered "presupposition" which the faulty signal line now embodied, the TV system was still acting as "rationally" as it had always done. It still produced an intelligible, coherent picture — even if you had to be on LSD to appreciate it. The only way to know something was wrong was to stand outside the system and judge it from afar.


If you accidentally "flip" or nullify any of the (perhaps hidden) presuppositions of a rational system, you can end up, without quite realizing what has happened or how, with a convincing, if false, phantasmagoria.

I think that is the explanation for such less-than-wonderful aspects of the history of Christianity as the Spanish Inquisition and burnings at the stake. The Church was eventually able to stand outside itself and see how wrong such "logical" applications of its own theology were. Thank God.

So the questions I have are these: why does the Pope think the suicide bombings and other evil manifestations of Islamic fundamentalism are categorically different from those Christian sins? Why does he imagine (if indeed he does) that radical Islamism is anything other than a flipped or nullified presupposition in the logical fabric of an otherwise rational belief system? Why does he not believe that patient dialogue with Islam can help it recover its balance, to all our benefit?