What did Pope Benedict XVI Really Say

There has been a lot of commotion (see for example, this from Israel) about what the Pope said in his "Meeting with the Representatives of Science" in Germany on the 12th. I suggest you read the full text yourself. For those interested in knowledge, it is a useful discussion by one far more thoughtful and learned than I.

But the tempest in the teapot is just that. The Pope quoted a short segment of a dialog between Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian (recorded by an unknown hand, possibly that of the emporer himself) from an edition by Professor Theodore Khoury. He, the Pope, certainly does not suggest that the emporer was right in the quoted remark. If anything, he implies that its "startling brusqueness" was a rhetorical ploy used for argumentative or discursive purpose. The statement is placed in the context of theological debate, which the Pope clearly suggests has value and importance. Indeed, a major theme of the speech seems to be the division of that of Greek philosophy which is intrisic to the New Testiment and thus to Christian and Moslem religion, that which is intrinsic to European culture and philosophy (but not to the religions), and by elimination that which is neither. The Pope must be careful of what he says, as the tempest demonstrates, but I can say that even this speech makes clear that he is a serious student of the "structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man". I would note that the Pope states that the emporer surely knew that "surah 2, 256 reads: 'There is no compulsion in religion'."

I will quote the English version of the text at length because it so eloquently refutes my last posting:

The scientific ethos, moreover, is......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.